Haunted
by InfiniteSeahorse
Summary: Zelda and Link have subdued the Calamity, but complications keep popping up that threaten their newfound love. If Zelda's pouring her energy into fixing Link's broken memory, then she can't dwell on her own problems. Link insists that he's made peace with his losses, but when his past comes back in pieces, will he deny what his memories mean to him?
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: For the purpose of fleshing out some background information, I consider this story to be in the same AU with two of my other fics- _Unintentional Consequences of Memory Retrieval_ and _Do You Like Me? Check One: [x] Yes [_] No_.**

* * *

Princess Zelda, along with her last remaining Champion and faithful knight attendant, Link, managed to spend an entire week in Kakariko Village before its protective circle of mountains, and the inhabitants they sheltered, went from feeling like a comforting support to an overbearing presence. The isolated Sheikah-run town had been their first stop in their impromptu tour of informing the kingdom's populace of their success in vanquishing the Calamity, and it was their last stop before setting up their more-or-less permanent residence in Hateno. They hadn't discussed how long they would stay in any one place, leaving it up to the princess' whims. Up till now, they had flitted from town to town like messenger birds, staying a night or two and promising to return for a longer visit in the near future. On the way to Kakariko Village, Zelda mentioned needing a base of operations, one that wasn't thick with memories of loss and destruction, one that did not hold the lingering stench of Malice, and Link, with a renewed twinkle that Zelda so loved to see in her knight's eye, replied, "Did I ever tell you that I'm a homeowner now?"

But before they could retire to his country bungalow, Zelda needed to attend to one final piece of royal business. After the initial shock of seeing both princess and knight alive, healthy, and _triumphant_ wore off, it was back to business as usual for Impa, and in the intervening days between their visits, she had enthusiastically resumed her role as royal advisor. With the help of her granddaughter, Paya, she had unearthed vast reams of paperwork that dated back to the three most recent rulers of Hyrule, with selected works from even more distant times, and these she pressed upon Zelda at her return. Impa insisted that she was to read carefully through the assembled materials, the tone of her aged but clear voice subtly suggesting that strict adherence to her advice must be paid, or dire consequences would be suffered.

"I remember the castle's library well, even though it has been many years since I have walked through its aisles. I do not know what resources there have been lost to the depredations of evil and time. Here, in my personal archives, I hope you will find some wisdom to guide your future rule."

Impa's 'personal archives' were stacked around the perimeter of the house's central room, shrinking the usable space in it by a third or more.

Zelda gazed wide-eyed in admiration at the trove of books and papers surrounding her. "But there's so much here! How did you know to keep it all safe?"

"It has been the work of my lifetime. I have led and organized many rescue parties to recover these materials from the castle over the years. Treasure hunters aren't the only ones taking priceless relics from the castle, I'll have you know." Impa rubbed some invisible dust off of the crate she stood next to, a pleased little smile lifting the corner of her mouth in a subtle show of pride.

A wavering trickle of uncertainty made its way down Zelda's spine to settle alongside the excitement she had first felt after seeing the transformed room. _This might be all that remains of the written history of Hyrule. And now it is my kingdom. My responsibility to rule._ She looked over to a large, leather bound book that rested atop a stack of similar tomes. This one was titled _**Royal Biographies, vol. CLXVII: The First Thirty Years of the Life of King Rhoam Bosphoramus Hyrule**_, and when she read her father's name, her excitement left her all at once, like a candle blown out in a stiff breeze. Her uncertainty met its new companion— grief.

Her surroundings wavered, and for one terrifying instant, she thought she was back in the castle, attempting to reach out with her divine sight from her place within the chitinous wrappings of Calamity Ganon. She blinked, her vision cleared, and she was surprised to feel several hot tears land on the back of her hand. She found herself leaning over the book, hand obscuring the words on the cover, and without raising her head, she addressed Impa, "I will be ready to begin my lessons shortly. Please, I—" she could feel the old woman's eyes on her, pity and sympathy coming together to target all her weaknesses— "I need a few moments to refresh myself." _I need to be alone! No, not alone, just away from her judging stare._ The back room of the house beckoned, a basin of cool water ready for her to plunge her sorrows into.

* * *

In the afternoon on the sixth day of their visit, Impa and Zelda were deep in conversation over the complicated details of reconstruction. Impa, noble as ever, sat empty-handed on her stack of pillows and fielded a steady stream of questions from Zelda, who had sat herself on the ground on a single, much smaller cushion and was surrounded by haphazard piles of books and papers. Crates of parchments and additional books had been dragged from their original places to encircle the women in a wide secondary ring.

"According to this law, permanent housing for all affected residents must be secured within three months of any natural disaster! But with regards to subsection B, rebuilding cannot proceed without an official survey, and the surveyor's guild has been disbanded for seventy-two years!" Zelda shook her head in frustration from her place amid the towering stacks of books and smoothed out the sheet of paper she had been crumpling in her grasp.

"This is worse than starting from scratch. Building a kingdom back up from half-destroyed foundations is utterly confusing. What takes precedence? What is useless, and what is necessary? What if some scholar, or the mayor of a town comes along and tells me that I'm doing it all wrong?" Panic began to creep into Zelda's words as she voiced her feeling of growing ineptitude.

In a firm, yet gently encouraging voice, Impa prompted, "That's another item to put on your list, dear. Remember, you have to take issues one at a time, weigh their importance and severity, and delegate. You were born to this role, and you will rise to the occasion."

"Yes, and I was also born to seal the Calamity, and look how well that turned out," Zelda muttered under her breath.

"What was that, dear?"

"Oh nothing, just thinking aloud," she said with a practiced smile. "Could you please pass me that stack marked, 'Town Plotting Guidelines', it's to your left."

In the same room, Link stood by the doorway in a space he had cleared of clutter, facing a window and half asleep. The fragments of his previous life left in his subconscious told him to be within eyesight of the princess at all times, but the dim of time and his comfortable surroundings left him lax in the details of his duty. He let the women's conversation wash over him, aware of the tone of their words, but not the specific content. Zelda's panicked voice roused him from his daydream, and he turned halfway from the window to concentrate on what was causing her distress.

Minutes before, Paya had excused herself from the discussion, and was now returning to the room with a heavily laden tea tray. She put it down without comment after cleaning off a low table which had been pulled up next to the two ladies. Zelda glanced at the overflowing dishes of apples, roasted nuts, and pie slices wedged in amongst the tea cups and pot, and thought with some irritation, _Typical Shiekah hospitality. That is entirely too much food. What a waste._

Her appetite had yet to recover from her disconnection from the physical realm while containing Calamity Ganon, and she had spent the last few weeks subsisting on a diet composed mainly of elixirs, assorted broths, and tea. Solid foods were still beyond her ability and desire to consume. Then Zelda looked up at Paya, who had frozen, still crouched over the tray with her eyes locked on the sleepy knight in the corner, and she understood the reason for the unusual bounty immediately. Sometimes she forgot her knight could out-eat a hinox.

Paya and Link had been exchanging a series of increasingly nervous and awkward glances over the last few days, and neither of them had spoken more than a polite and innocuous word or two to the other in all that time. Zelda understood how Paya felt, even though it had taken her considerably longer to recognize her feelings for what they were. Paya seemed to have no such problem on that front, as she was easier to read than the royal decrees she held in her hand.

What Zelda didn't understand was why Link was acting in a similar manner. _I would have known if there was something between them,_ she thought. _Or he would have told me. Wouldn't he?_

Too much of her time before the Calamity had been spent deciphering the static moods of her knight protector. Now it seemed she would have to begin her studies anew. His new candor still startled her. The ease at which Link talked and laughed was by turns refreshing and confounding to Zelda, who wondered what other changes his memory loss had caused in him. She sensed that, like the wide open sea hid its unseen depths, his openness hid many new secrets.

Something about Paya's abrupt lack of movement must have attracted Link's attention, and he swiveled his head to meet her gaze. Zelda was called back to her conversation by a pointed question from Impa, so she missed whatever nonverbal communication passed behind her back, but she did hear two sets of footsteps leave the room, followed by Paya's mumbled, "Please excuse me," and then she heard the door slide shut after them.

"I think we should take a small break while we await Paya's return. It is for her benefit that she understands the process of decision making at the royal level. I have been teaching her for a few years now in anticipation of your return, but there's nothing like a practical lesson to really make sure the information sticks. Having another perspective on a problem can really help solve it." Impa reached over to the tray and selected a piece of pumpkin pie. "Would you pour some tea, dear?"

Zelda served the tea and nibbled on bits of apple she'd sliced thin enough to become transparent while she thought over Impa's latest advice. _Perspective. Perhaps it's time to change perspectives again._

Half an hour later Paya came to collect the tray with its mostly untouched platters of snacks. She moved quietly as always, but her silence had a resigned quality to it that Zelda had never observed in her before. Zelda glanced at her as she dipped near to gather the empty teacup by her elbow, and she noticed that her eyes were limned in red and her skin was splotched with the same unhappy tint. The princess moved to put a comforting hand on her arm, but Paya jerked away and swept off to the kitchen. When she returned, the color in her face had gone down incrementally, but her slouching posture betrayed her sadness.

Paya picked her way around the paper piles and sat on her cushion. "Grandmother. Princess. I am ready to continue," she said with a little hesitation before addressing Zelda. There would be no discussion of Paya's state of mind that afternoon.

* * *

Link showed up just before supper with his arms full of flowers. The sweet smell of plum blossoms mingled with the spicier fragrance of silent princesses and drifted across the room to where the women were setting the table for the upcoming meal.

"For the ladies of the house," Link said, mumbling slightly and keeping his gaze focused firmly on the gift in his arms. "Lady Impa, I didn't know what your favorite flower was, so I picked a few different kinds…"

"Isn't that thoughtful!" Zelda cried, hoping to cover the strained silence with her cheerful response. "And such lovely flowers, they'll be sure to remind you of us after we leave tomorrow!" All eyes flew to the princess, who smiled calmly, as if their travel plans had been known from the beginning, instead of suddenly announced thirty seconds ago.

"I'll put them in a vase for you, Master Link," Paya squeaked, and grabbed the flowers from him to run from the room.

"Tomorrow?" Impa protested. She had been 'supervising' the younger women with the brim of her large hat pulled down over her eyes, and now she sat up and readjusted herself to watch the goings-on. "Are you sure you want to leave after such a short time? We've barely begun to go over how to reintroduce a system of lordships, not to mention the issue of the military, and I don't think we have even touched any of the documents against the back wall!"

"Impa, you are an incalculable font of knowledge, and I appreciate everything you have done for Link and I," Zelda began. "With this incredibly thorough overview of my duties and your many enumerated concerns for the country's welfare in this time of transition, I feel confident that I will be up to the challenge of leading my people as their queen. I just need a little bit longer to absorb this influx of information, and to come up with a few ideas on my own schedule. When I am ready to take the next step, you will be the first to know. I promise it won't take long." She had been thinking of what to say all afternoon, and the words flowed remarkably smoothly for only being practiced in her head.

The old woman pursed her lips, displeasure rising in her words. "This country has survived without a head of state or a unifying government for a century, but I do not think it will continue much longer without a guiding hand. Your people need you, Zelda."

Paya came back, shielding her face and most of her upper body with the enormous bouquet of flowers, and set them in the center of the dining table. "I think we should eat before the food gets cold," she said, loud enough to pull Impa's attention away from scolding the princess. Zelda said a little prayer of thanks for Paya's impeccable handling of her grandmother, and walked towards her seat.

"I hope those plum blossoms weren't from Mellie's orchard," Impa admonished, clearly not ready to stop picking a fight, as she sat down at the head of the table.

Link's face paled, and he shook his head adamantly as he protested, "No offense, but she gave me a look like a smacked cucoo when I tried to walk around in there! No way would I ever try to nab a branch from her orchard!"

"It's nice to know that someone still respects their elders," Impa said sweetly, and the room was silent for the rest of the meal.

* * *

Up in the privacy of Paya's room at the close of the day, Zelda spared one last thought for Impa, who would undoubtedly get over her disappointment at their abrupt departure, and unleashed her simmering curiosity upon her hapless companion.

"What did you say to her?" It wasn't what she really wanted to ask. Her true question, _What did you do with her_, stayed unspoken and echoing in her mind, fearful that her unease from earlier, that tiny fear that Link was hiding something from her, would be proven true. She sat next to him on Paya's soft bed, the clean fragrance of the village soap on the sheets fading in submission to the smell of their mingled sweat. She wasn't sure whose job it was to change the sheets, but who ever it was had not done so since the beginning of their stay. Unwanted images of Link and Paya engaging in a series of increasingly passionate activities on that very spot filled Zelda's imagination as she braced herself for his answer. That they could have begun a physical relationship was a faintly ridiculous, yet completely plausible idea to her jealous mind.

"Who? Oh, Paya." Link replied as he looked at Zelda, who was gesturing pointedly at the room around her. "I tried to let her down easy, I swear," he said somberly. "I just told her the truth."

"Which is?" She held her breath. He stared at her, silent for so long she thought her heart would burst. "Stop looking at me like that! I'm not omniscient, Link. You have to say it out loud."

Link picked up her hand and held it to his chest, covering it with his own. His warm, callused fingers stroked her skin gently. "That I love you. And that we're together now."

Zelda's heart did burst then, in an outpouring of love for her hero. The edges of her vision glittered with gold, and she threw herself at him, knocking them both sideways onto the mattress and sending pillows skittering to the floor. "I love you, too," she whispered into the crook of his neck, where she had landed in her excitement. Pressing a kiss into his skin, ignoring the awkward tangle of their arms and legs, she repeated herself. "I love you, too."


	2. Chapter 2

From his spot at the kitchen table, Link watched Zelda pace with unconcealed agitation around the ground floor of his house. The two of them had spent an entire week indoors after leaving Kakariko Village on horseback, burdened with all the reading materials that could fit into their saddle bags, and with additional documents loaded onto a borrowed donkey as well. Other than answering the call of nature, or fetching water from the nearby stream, Link and Zelda's world had shrunk to fit only what was encompassed within the sturdy walls of the house in Hateno.

For the most part, Link was fine with it. He knew Zelda was still coming to terms with being an active member of the world again, and she would have to take time to adjust to life in this new century. It had taken him many months to recover from his time suspended in the Slumber of Restoration, and he expected the same for his princess. _His princess. _The thought tickled him. Wasn't she everyone's princess, and hadn't she always been his, formally speaking? Here was a new change for him. Sharing his daily life with a partner— someone to remind him that his nightmares were not real, someone to cook for, someone he could protect and cherish and look at and touch everyday because she was still _alive_… He thanked the goddesses every morning when he woke up and felt Zelda nestled in his arms, and the itch in his soul that called out for adventure was soothed for another day.

Over a month had passed since they had sealed the Calamity, and since that day, Zelda had kept Link continuously in her sight. They had no privacy, and no expectation of it, either. Link assumed he had been under Zelda's all-seeing divine eye since waking up from his coma, Zelda was living with the vague terror that Link would disappear from her forever if she lost track of his whereabouts, and these thought patterns kept them orbiting around each other like two heavenly objects in an empty sky.

One another's location was almost always apparent in the open plan of the little house, but Link had still developed the habit of narrating his movements from room to room and floor to floor, announcing his intent to perform any activity before he carried out the action. Zelda would look up from her reading with a happy little smile, or make a noise of confirmation that let him know she appreciated his telling her. Only once did he leave the house without notifying her first, and he still felt a twinge of unease when he thought about it.

A few days ago, they had run out of milk and eggs, and he asked if she'd like to walk into town with him to buy more at the general store. She declined, and gently deflected when he inquired as to her reason why, but soon enough, he had his answer when the soft whisper of turning pages ceased and he heard her deep and even breaths issuing from the loft where they slept. He had sprinted down the hill into town with his heart in his throat, heading straight for the general store and ignoring the curious looks of the villagers as he passed. Slapping a handful of rupees on the counter, Link scooped up the entire stock of milk bottles in one arm, pocketed half a dozen eggs with his free hand, and exited the shop before its creaky wooden door had time to shut. He was back home within minutes, and after he put the supplies away and got his breathing under control, he climbed the stairs to check on Zelda.

She was golden in her slumber, lying peacefully amidst the strewn about piles of old documents and books she had taken to bed with her. A healthy glow illuminated her skin, and he wondered if it came from the food he had been cooking for her since her appetite returned, or if she was tapping into her divine power while she slept. He hoped it was the food. Every bite was cooked with his love. Link wanted to wake her up and ask her if she could taste the care and affection he poured into his cooking, but he knew better than to disturb her nap, even if it was the third one she had taken that day.

Zelda led and Link followed. That part was easy. It was simple to fall back into his old habits as her knight attendant, and after the third time he had dutifully dogged her path to the outhouse, she had to gently remind him that while she appreciated his vigilance elsewhere, it wasn't necessary to follow her all the way to _that_ specific location. As the days stretched out and Zelda remained content to spend her time indoors, alternating between reading books in bed and reading books at the kitchen table, Link wondered how he was supposed to follow if the princess stopped leading.

He asked her to go on a walk with him through the woods each morning, then at midday he asked if she would like to eat a picnic lunch, and in the evenings, he watched from behind a window as the sunset painted glorious colors across the sky and asked again if she would care to take a stroll outside. By the fifth day of rejected attempts to get her out of the house, he stopped asking. Maybe she'd change her mind when she ran out of reading material.

If not physically, then mentally, perhaps, he would try to go where Zelda went. He would need to work on his philosophical debate and scientific reasoning skills. Back in the day, Zelda had a few dedicated, like-minded people to communicate with, but now, the only option she chose was Link. The conversations they had that went towards her areas of expertise always ended in a few distinct ways; either petering out within a few minutes as Zelda expected Link to reply with something insightful and receiving a blank stare in return, Zelda holding an extemporaneous lecture while Link listened attentively, or Link distracting Zelda by casually removing his clothes.

Zelda stopped pacing around the room and began rummaging through the storage area, a roomy space beneath the stairs that had been packed full of various dry goods Link had gathered over the past few months. Before turning her interest to the space under the stairs, she had announced that she was bored and hungry, a combination that usually ended with Link licking the sticky remains of a honeyed apple from Zelda's fingers, lips, and one very memorable time, from the hollow of her throat down through the entirety of her cleavage. He thanked the Goddesses every day for low-cut country-style blouses, too.

This time, however, Link watched as Zelda's attention was grabbed by something glinting in the far corner of the cupboard, and she reached out with a sure arm to grasp it. She held a compact, opaque bottle by its stubby neck, and as she turned it this way and that to study its smudged label in the dim light, facets cut into its circumference reflected and sparkled as if it were made of gemstone.

"Goron… Fire Whiskey?" She turned and carefully picked her way out of the storage space. "Link! Look at this!" she said excitedly. "Do you remember the night of the Midsummer Ball, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer challenged the entire Goron diplomatic corps to a drinking contest? Poor Lord Walton. He held his own for a remarkably long time, that is until Gorko brought out a bottle of this." She held the squat bottle aloft, smiling fondly at the memory. Her smile faltered as she glanced at Link, who was frowning slightly in what he hoped was a neutral way. "Oh, I'm sorry. That was terribly rude of me. Forget I even asked." She lowered the bottle and bit her lip in empathy.

"It's alright. I'm not offended." He paused, thinking. "You know, I've never tried to jog my memory using my other senses." Going to the places shown in the Sheikah Slate and looking at his surroundings had worked as intended, and until this day, it hadn't occurred to him that any other way was possible. "Let's crack open that bottle and see if it jars something loose." He rose from the table and retrieved two cups from the kitchen sideboard.

"That's a wonderful and fantastically scientific idea! Let's do it!" The sparkle in Zelda's eyes matched the glimmer thrown off by the bottle as she plunked it down on the table.

They sat facing each other, bottle and cups between them.

"Just a taste is all we need, I think," Zelda said. "According to the label, this is distilled at full Goron strength!" Her eyebrows rose, either impressed or intimidated, it was hard to tell with her sometimes. "This is no ordinary tourist fare, Link. Where did you get it?"

"Oh, it was a favor from a wedding I attended in Tarrey Town. Really lovely ceremony, not too many guests." He scratched the back of his head. "But, you probably know about it. Since you were watching me."

Zelda lowered her eyes back to the bottle and muttered, "Right, right. Tarrey Town." It was a new settlement in Akkala, one that hadn't existed a century ago, and they had visited it briefly on their way to see Robbie. Resuming her previous peppy attitude, she continued, "Anyway, let's begin the experiment!"

Link eased the cork from the bottle with a satisfying pop, and as he began to pour them each a measure of the dark liquid, Zelda spoke.

"Let me set the scene for you before we begin," she said, good humor flashing in her eyes as she drew her cup towards herself. "It's been a busy week of celebrations leading up to Midsummer's Day. The castle is filled to bursting with distinguished visitors from all over the kingdom, and the surrounding town has been an unconstrained party zone for three days straight! Complicating the matter is the fact that, much to my disappointment, you have recently been appointed as my personal knight."

"Ah, yes!" he interrupted, leaning over the table. "I do remember that night! You kept sneaking off when you thought I was distracted. Once, I found you on a balcony, in the dark, with the court poet!"

Zelda squinted at Link, the color rising in her cheeks as she calculated the veracity of his statement. "You're a dirty liar! That never happened!"

"Then why did it take you so long to deny it?" he laughed. His mirth died out as he looked at the sour look on Zelda's face, and he quickly apologized, adding, "I still think it was funny," under his breath.

Link curled his hand around his cup and brought it to his lips. Before he could get in a sip, Zelda raised her cup in the air and announced, "I propose a toast. To your past!"

"—to the future!" Link said at the same time.

They downed their shots simultaneously. Link prepared for the memory to wash over him and plunge him into the past. The whiskey traced a burning line down his throat and bloomed through his stomach. The feeling was familiar, and he gasped and choked a bit as a medicinal, intensely spicy smell with undertones of charred wood assaulted his sinuses with his inhalation. He shivered, not from the physical sensation of the alcohol, but from the new memory rising in his mind.

Zelda's green eyes changed into the amber eyes of a different princess, and the walls of his house faded, only to be replaced by the empty night sky surrounding the reservoir above Zora's Domain. Link breathed out, and he heard a corresponding exhalation from the young woman standing in front of him.

"I think my gills are on fire!" Mipha gasped. Her voice wavered with the thrill of their secret adventure.

She held an elaborately decorated stone and silver goblet in one graceful hand, and she pressed her other hand to her chest to compose herself, holding her necklace against the sash she wore to denote her Champion status. Link's heart jumped in his chest to see the warm smile spread across the face of his beloved, and he used his free hand to grip the base of her headfin and bring her in for a fierce kiss. The cool fire of her whiskey-soaked lips burned against his before he opened his mouth just enough to bring her lower lip in for an impatient nibble. Heat rose from deep inside himself to counter the embers burning in his gut. They parted briefly, and Mipha said with a start, "I didn't expect that to take effect quite so quickly!"

Link licked his lips, where the ghost of his lover's kiss lingered. His recollection was fading, and he became aware of Zelda's curious gaze upon him once more. "The Zoras believed Fire Whiskey was an aphrodisiac…" he muttered, off-kilter from the swirl of emotions playing within him.

"What? Why would you know that? I know you lived with them when you were young, but that does _not _seem like appropriate knowledge for children to have, and furthermore, that's only tangentially related to the subject at hand!" was Zelda's confused response.

Link allowed the trails of memory to uncurl in the back of his mind as he continued to explain his outburst.

"I didn't remember the night of the drinking contest. I remembered something completely different." He wasn't going to lie to Zelda, but he didn't feel comfortable telling her the truth in all its nitty gritty detail either, at least, not until he had had some time to absorb and reflect as privately as he could about what he had rediscovered. He settled for something in between.

"It was just a short flashback to when I was visiting a friend. I had the Master Sword with me. And— there was a, a Zora, who was going through some exotic bottles of booze on a shelf…" He shook his head as if to extract more detail from the memory. "Teenagers. Boasting about their father's liquor cabinet. I guess I had a run in with this stuff before my royal introduction to it." He shrugged his shoulders and smiled, his air of nonchalance masking the turmoil he felt not just about keeping something from Zelda, but the content of the memory itself.

He had been told that he and Mipha had been lifelong friends, and that their relationship had progressed to the point of getting engaged. He even had the suit of betrothal armor to prove it. What he didn't have was ninety percent of the details and feelings that went along with the stories and assurances given him by his old friends, and this new memory went a long way toward filling in the gaps.

Relief washed over Zelda's face as she announced, "Well then, I declare this to be a successful experiment!" She lowered her eyelids and leaned forward into the table as she continued, "Sir Link, would you like to put the Zora's assertion to the test?"

Link was not at all surprised to hear her offer, and he was grateful for her ability to distract him from his recollection. He would have plenty of time to think about it later. "Yes I would, Your Highness. Is it working for you yet, or would you like another taste?" He raised the whiskey bottle and jiggled it in the air.

With a devilish smile, she replied, "I'd prefer a taste of you."

"Let's see if we can make it to the bed this time." He stood up and adjusted himself through his trousers in the process of walking around the table. Fire Whiskey or no, he was ready for more than a taste of Zelda.

"Challenge accepted!"

Link scooped Zelda into his arms and carried her up the stairs. He paused halfway up, distracted momentarily by a metallic jingling noise. It sounded just like Mipha's necklace falling to the ground… No. It sounded nothing like that. What he heard was a clunkier sound made by his belt buckle knocking against the metal buttons on Zelda's skirt. He pushed the thought away and continued up the stairs without further incident.

On the bed, he kneeled over his waiting princess and looked down at her body. He couldn't wait to rip off her sash… He sat back and dropped his head into his hands. _No, no, that was all wrong. _Zelda wasn't wearing a sash. She was wearing his favorite style of low-cut blouse, combined with a long, full skirt that allowed her to sit cross-legged on the bed. He remained motionless, willing his thoughts to stay on track.

In the absence of his assistance, Zelda began to undress herself. Unbuttoning her blouse as she laid down, she said teasingly, "Link, I'm up here. Not in your hands. Not yet."

Taking a deep breath, he looked up again. _Green eyes. Golden hair. _He descended eagerly into Zelda's waiting arms.

The way she kissed him must be divinely inspired. He seriously considered never leaving the house, much less the bed, if she kept kissing him like that. The taste of fire whiskey grew stronger in Zelda's mouth, and her teeth sharpened impossibly against Link's lips as he lost himself to memory again.

_I can't keep going on like this, _he thought worriedly. _These flashbacks are throwing me off. I need something to break the connection. _Water. There was a pitcher of water on the table on the other side of the loft. Rising from her embrace, he floated the idea of pausing the action. "That whiskey made me thirsty. Can I get you a glass of water?"

"Oh, okay, I'd like that." Zelda was gracious in her acceptance, even as irritation flashed across her face at the interruption. He poured a full glass for each of them and made a show of drinking his in one long swallow.

Zelda giggled as she took the water from his hand. "I'll call you the Hero of Hydration from now on!" When she kissed him again after finishing her own glass, he tasted only sweet flesh and cool water, and an odd pang of relief and loss passed through him.

They wasted no time in picking back up where they left off. Link was working a toe-curling rhythm into Zelda with his fingers as they lay side by side, when she put her hand over his, bringing everything to a standstill yet again, and said, "I have a confession to make."

Muzzily, he thought of a response. "You need to use the privy?"

"No!"

"It's nap time already?"

"No! Link, listen to me, this is important."

"Of course," he said apologetically, and withdrew his fingers, settling down next to her on the bed. He licked his fingers clean, making Zelda shudder with desire at the sight, and gathered her in his arms. "Tell me your secret, my princess."

Zelda refused to meet his gaze, but proceeded to speak. "When you pretended to remember that night… at the ball. The reason why I didn't reply to you right away was… I was shocked by how close you came to the truth. You… you never caught us, but we, we were… " She stopped, burrowing her head in Link's chest.

He petted her head reassuringly. "It's okay. You don't have to tell me. That was a long time ago."

She lifted her head to look him in the eye. "But I want to. It might be in the past, but it's important that you know. Zalla and I… we had… a fling?" She inflected the end of her sentence like a question, but Link had no answer, so he kept patting her head.

"Are you surprised? Angry? Sad? I would like to know how you feel, Link."

He was silent for a few moments while he thought about his response. "I do have a question for you. What did you see in that windbag?" Listening to Kass' songs and talking about his teacher had dredged up feelings about the court musician that Link had been unable to place with a name until now.

Zelda blushed. "A musician's fingers… are deft. And responsive. They were a temporary distraction from the snowballing disaster of my life, as it was. But I wasn't in love with him, and he knew it, and he suffered for it. The relationship, if you could even call it that, didn't last long. It barely even started before he called it off." She shrugged, her confession lightening her mood. "That was in the past," she repeated. "They'll write that in the history books, if anyone finds out about it," she added with a laugh.

"Hmmm," Link said. The pieces were coming together now. Was this all a roundabout way for her to relive a little bit of her past? He decided to test his theory. "Well, how do you think I guessed?"

"What do you mean?" Zelda sat up, and frowned down at Link.

He spoke gently. "I mean that I might not have recovered that memory from drinking, but I do know that you and what's his name, Zalla?— had a thing going on for quite some time, because I read it in one of your diaries."

She became very pale and very still once she heard those last words. "My diaries? Whatever do you mean?" she repeated. "I had a research journal, several of them, shelves full of them, in fact, but no diary. You must be mistaken." She closed her mouth and compressed her lips into a thin line.

"And you are a terrible liar. I found them in your room, one on your desk, and one next to your bed. They weren't even hidden, Zelda, unless you consider resting under a century of dust and cobwebs hiding."

Zelda turned away from Link and began searching the bed and floor for her discarded clothes. He stared at her hunched shoulders and wondered what he had said to earn her displeasure.

"I don't know why you're trying to deny it. I thought you wanted to talk about this."

She said stiffly, with her back still facing Link, as she did up the buttons on her blouse, "I wanted you to remember by yourself, or I wanted to be the one to tell you. I didn't write very logically in my personal diaries— That's why I have so many more research journals, I suppose. I just don't want you to have a biased view of what I was like back then."

Link sat up and scooted closer to her. He brushed the hair away from the nape of her neck and kissed her there, lingering to feel the heat of her body against his lips. Zelda relaxed and leaned against his chest.

"I do have a biased view of you. I'm convinced that you are the best thing that ever happened to me."

She huffed the tiniest puff of air in negation. "I got you killed."

"You saved me." He hugged her tightly. "No more arguments. But if you still want to, you can tell me more about your fling with the musician."

Zelda did not speak until she had first resumed and then finished getting dressed. "I told you I didn't love him."

Link waited for her to continue, but she looked at him from her place beside the bed as if it were his turn to speak, so he prompted, "Yes. But there must have been a reason why you wanted to be with him."

That must have been the correct response, for in a cracked voice, Zelda said, "I suppose in the beginning I was infatuated. I wanted the experience, too." She sighed, clutching her hands together nervously, and continued, "It's so much harder than I expected to talk about this out loud! He… he made me feel… like I mattered. Like I wasn't broken. That I had a purpose, beyond that of being what I was born to do." Her face collapsed, and tears began streaming silently down her cheeks.

Link jumped up from the bed to enfold the despondent princess in a life-affirming hug. All he could do was hold her while she let her sorrow flow. He knew he had not been able to help her in the way she so desperately needed back then, not completely. It sounded like she had found true comfort in the Sheikah poet, and he was thankful she'd had that small piece of joy in her life.

"If it makes you feel any better, he didn't die in the Calamity. He escaped from the castle in time and lived a long life afterward. He became a teacher, and taught a Rito named Kass all the songs and legends he learned about the hero. Because of Kass, and Zalla, I recovered more of my strength and skill than I would have on my own."

In response, Zelda gripped Link harder and nodded wetly into his shoulder. With a quiet desperation coloring his request, he continued, "I can hold your pain for you. I want it. I can take it from you, and carry it, so you aren't burdened by it anymore. I can see how it affects you every day…" He trailed off, and he wondered if he said too much. Zelda didn't like having her flaws pointed out, but in his opinion, this went beyond having a few hairs out of place or a spelling mistake in a final draft of a speech.

Much sooner than he expected her to, Zelda leaned back from the solid reassurance of his embrace and wiped her eyes. "Thank you for your offer, but I fear that my pain is a permanent part of me now, one that I can manage on my own. It's more important to me that you go to the castle and retrieve that diary. All of them! On my desk, under my bed, any personal correspondence, unpublished royal memoirs, whatever you found while you were previously searching the castle, you need to bring it all back here." Her voice was panicked but her gaze on him held steady as she implored him to go.

Having been successfully distracted from one facet of Zelda's mental state, Link balked mentally at the order. The situation must be serious if she wanted him to go halfway across Hyrule for a few old diaries, but on the other hand, he had never been farther than a stone's throw away from her in a month. "Are you sure?" he asked. "I don't want to leave you alone."

Zelda moved across the room to the writing desk, which, like every other piece of furniture in the house, was piled high with papers and books, and selected a random handful. "If there's one thing I learned from my father, it's that I need to be in control of my own image. I'll be fine here in the house if I read through this—" She looked down at the scroll unfurling in her grip— "treatise on the historical trade routes of Faron for the third time. Go now, Link. Drink a swift elixir and take the Sheikah Slate!" She glanced over at Link's bare body and added, "But put on your trousers first."

* * *

**A/N: **The character of Zalla is a version of the court poet borrowed with permission from GodlessOx's story _Peace Offering_, which can be read on Archive of Our Own. If you're interested in reading Zelda's diary, check out _A Goddess Made Mortal and a Veil of Shadow, _also on Ao3 (warning: contains explicit content).


	3. Chapter 3

Bolstered by the unprecedented success of their first unplanned experiment into the nature of memory restoration, Zelda started to work on Link's brain in earnest. When she grew tired of reading about royal history and the long-forgotten minutiae of decades worth of council meetings, or on nights when the moon rode high, tinged with the faintest echo of pink, and neither of them could sleep, Zelda would talk. She told Link stories of every positive memory she had of him. Although he had been unable to locate the journal he had previously found beneath her bed, they went through the rest of the diaries he had removed from the castle, and included some excerpts from the Champions' journals that he had copied with permission from the village elders who had been holding onto them for safekeeping. Link read them out loud, to practice his speaking voice, and Zelda embellished each entry from her perspective with details of what had come before and after.

Progress was frustratingly slow. She would have said it was nonexistent, if not for the small signs of his changed mental state that her analytical nature picked out. First, Link's nightmares grew in frequency. Several times a week now she would be awoken by a choked sob or a strangled cry, with Link clinging to her in the darkness. He never spoke about his dreams in the morning, saying only that he did not remember them once he woke up. Second, he seemed to grow more distant for a time after hearing her more personal recollections. It was hard for her too, as they read through everyone's last weeks and days before the Calamity, and her anxiety returned, digging deceitful claws into her heart to remind her of what her delayed success had cost. Link didn't tell her outright to stop recounting her stories, but he no longer encouraged her to continue.

Link insisted that his loss was bearable, that he was making new and much more pleasant memories in their absence, but Zelda thought that it wasn't good enough. She wanted to bridge the gap between the knight she had known and the hero she loved, and she felt if he wasn't getting something positive from her effort, it too could be added to her pile of failures. Aside from sharing her past with him, Zelda wasn't sure what she should do next to unlock his inner self.

* * *

The immediate and crucial work of introducing Zelda to her kingdom was over. Thanks to the power of the Sheikah Slate, travel to the various towns and major settlements around Hyrule was nearly instantaneous, and she had been able to confer with the leaders of all the tribes in less than a fortnight. Reassuring the people that the Calamity had been vanquished had been Impa's first task given to the heroes when they had come to tell her about their success, and Zelda and Link had swiftly carried out the good news, riding high on their wave of victory. As her emotions leveled in the weeks that followed, Zelda pulled back into herself, and she began to detach herself from her accomplishment. She shrank it so small, like something she could hold in her hand and let the wind blow away, and eventually, it stopped feeling like an accomplishment at all. What was her success in the face of the destruction and chaos that still ravaged the land? She attempted to turn her mind to other matters, to stop dwelling on the ghosts of all who had died and who haunted her, but the stubborn conviction that she had failed after all nagged at her constantly.

Freedom was something Zelda had dearly wished for before the Calamity; a few hours of time to herself, unstructured and unrelated to her studies, was more precious to her than diamonds. Her life had been so regimented a century ago, scheduled to within the minute every single day since before her mother died, and even scientific exploration was relegated to specific expeditions that were limited in preference to her father's wishes. She was so thankful that she no longer had to spend countless hours pouring her energy into praying to...what, exactly? Herself? She still didn't fully understand the connection between herself and Hylia. After a lifetime of prayer and research, and a hundred years of using the power she had desperately wished for, she still had only a basic idea of how she had opened herself to the goddess. The voice inside the Sword still spoke to her with gentle chiming tones, and if she concentrated, she could summon the feeling of golden magic coursing through her body, but most days she was grateful that part of her life was over with. She wasn't incurious about her birthright, but it made her so _tired _whenever she thought about her ties to divinity, so in preference to more pressing matters, she stopped thinking about it altogether. To be her own steward, to choose her own schedule was a wholly foreign concept to her mind, and she struggled daily despite the fresh joy that fluttered in her heart. She attempted to give herself a schedule, but with no one checking up on her and no one dependent on her orders, she quickly found herself abandoning her to-do lists.

Day by day, the coziness and charm of the house in Hateno slowly wore off, revealing a threadbare homespun character at its core that chafed at Zelda. She didn't exactly miss the castle, with its unique brand of suffocating rigor and ancient arrogance, but at least there she knew what she was supposed to be doing. She was finding it more and more difficult to fill her days with activity in this sleepy farming town, and she was dismayed to find that her interest waned in preparing herself for her eventual rule over the country. More often than not, when she picked up a book or unrolled a scroll, she skimmed a few words and set it aside in favor of staring into space. Naps punctuated her days with greater frequency than ever before, and the bone-deep tiredness that followed her around the house and reminded her of her first few disorienting days after sealing Ganon became harder and harder to shake off.

Worst of all was the way her growing frustration and listlessness affected her interactions with Link. For a man whose impeccable manners and strict sense of propriety went hand in hand with his unmatched combat skills, and who she remembered as being able to walk down a hallway in full plate armor with hardly a sound, he sure made a lot of noise these days just rattling around the house in his underwear. He sighed when he read, he grunted when he stretched, and he hummed when he cooked, the sound of which used to fill Zelda with cheer and anticipation for whatever gourmet food was about to be served, but now made her wish that he used the outside cooking pot to prepare their meals more often.

She began to snap at Link, blaming his noises for breaking her concentration as she read, or attempted to draft a letter to Impa, or reorganized her notes on reforming a peacetime army. She apologized every time. It wasn't his fault, and she knew she was sliding back into her old habits, but her tongue moved faster than her brain and the harsh words kept spilling out before she could stifle them. Link's polite, gracious response was to give her more space. He spent more time outside, either in the yard practicing with his sword, or farther afield to hunt and fish. He always told her where he was going, and for how long he would be out, and he always came back on time with a smile on his face. It didn't stop Zelda from feeling bad that he needed to get away from her in the first place.

To temper her aggravation, Zelda turned to meditation. She hoped that the Sheikah-style method, useless in the past for getting her in touch with her inner divinity, could instead help her maintain an aura of more robust calmness than she was currently able to project. It helped some, and she began to recognize the warning signs of her displeasure and redirect the energy before it quickened into anger. As Zelda grew more aware of her emotional state, she noticed how lonely and bored she was in the house all by herself.

To Link's delight, this revelation finally got Zelda out of the house, but she still limited herself in the places she was willing to go. Walking through Hateno Town proper was out of the question— her nerves wouldn't allow her to be out in the public for long— but she surprised Purah and her assistant a handful of times by showing up on her doorstep by way of the Sheikah Slate. Strolling through the woods by Link's side reignited Zelda's curiosity about the natural world. She pocketed seeds, bulbs, and tubers from flowers that caught her eye when they came across a likely candidate on their daily perambulations, and she planted a garden out past the pond in the side yard. With Link's help, she prepared the soil and tucked in the seeds with utmost care. A little bit of everything was included in the plot: wildflowers from the surrounding countryside; fruits and vegetables grown from scraps, like the swift carrots sprouting from cut-off tops and mighty pumpkins from scraped out innards; and a very few plants with special meaning, planted in the center of the garden— Link had brought back a silent princess he had found growing on the desk in Zelda's study when he had gone to retrieve her personal papers, and she surrounded it with others she had found in shady corners of the forest. Even though they were only known to thrive in the wild, she planted them with a fervent prayer that they wouldn't know the difference.

Zelda had a new reason to get up in the morning. Every day she rose, going outside to check on the seedlings' progress, thrilled to see the tender green shoots breaking above the crust of earth. Her mood improved by leaps and bounds. With the gentle sun on her back and her hands in the soil, it was the closest she felt to divinity, other than when she had finally unlocked the power of Hylia, and, she thought with a little hitch in her chest, when she and Link were intimate.

Zelda grew consumed with her small garden plot, writing long lists of the best plants to grow together, and constructing ever more complicated diagrams and layouts that were pleasing to both the eye and landscape. She commandeered the help of a farmer whom she spied one day wandering down the lane, and interrogated him for over an hour about the growing seasons and common pests of the area. Her new hobby restored some of the balance to her life, and she went back to her royal studies with renewed interest. She wrote Impa a long letter, detailing her progress and asking her what her next steps in resuming her throne ought to be.

Day after day she worked outside, absorbed in her purpose and buoyed by the simple pleasures of what Link liked to tease her as "playing in the dirt". Then, one morning she awoke, anticipating the first blooms of what she thought might be a new kind of hybrid safflina, only to witness the utter devastation of her carefully tended, vibrantly growing garden. Her heart sank as she followed a trampled path through the wildflower field that surrounded the house. Something had been there, sampling at the fringes of the front yard before turning to the main course of the more succulent, intentionally planted fare in the back. Her sunken heart lurched when she saw a trio of sheep that had made their home amongst her beans, chewing hungrily at the last patch of mighty thistles. Apparently, everything she had planted had been edible, as the bare ground where her lush garden had once been was made clear.

"Shoo! Shoo! Bad sheep! Get out of my garden!" she shouted, waving her arms in a futile attempt to scare off the intruders. One simply stared at her, the next replied with an insolent sounding baa, and the last nosed at the ground, searching for another tasty mouthful. Zelda stomped over to the sheep, anger flaring in her eyes and her spine stiff with her intent to remove them from her property by whatever means she had at her disposal. As she approached, she realized that her knowledge of livestock was scanty at best, and limited to general sayings about their temperaments.

Sheep were docile, and easily led, she remembered. Were they easily led by anyone, or did it have to be specifically a shepherd? Were sheep known for biting? Should she push a sheep? Or cajole it with sweet words? She was not sure she could muster up any sweet words at the moment, so she settled for a hearty kick in the dirt in the animals' general direction while shouting again, louder than before and peppered with all the rudest words she had ever overheard from the castle guards.

It had no discernible effect on them. She tried over and over again, eventually screaming in frustration and heartbreak, and as one sheep lifted its tail to produce a modest pile of droppings where her silent princesses once grew, she heard Link come running up the path behind her.

"Zelda? Zelda! What's wrong? Are you al…" he trailed off as he surveyed the carnage left by the animals. He wrapped her up in his arms and turned her away from the scene she was staring at despondently.

"I recognize these sheep. They're from the ranch way over by the Tech Lab. I wonder why they came all the way here…" His ruminations weren't making Zelda feel any better, and he fell silent while he continued to support her body with his own.

"It was perfect!" Zelda burst out. "It was... was everything, and now there's nothing left! I worked s-so-so harrrrrd!" She collapsed into sobs, wracking her body with an outpouring of sorrow that strengthened as she continued to eulogize over her eaten plants. "All of my effort, wasted!" It was hard to spit the words out in between her heaving breaths, but it hurt too much to hold them in. "Why do I even bother… when it's destroyed… before I can enjoy it…"

Several minutes went by before she realized that Link had been repeatedly asking if she wanted to go back inside. She nodded, and a fresh wave of tears overwhelmed her before she could say anything. They made their way back to the house, Link's gentle hand on the small of her back a constant reminder of his presence as she walked slowly through her ruined masterpiece.

Zelda went straight to bed and stayed there for the entire day. When Link made breakfast, she apologized with an unsteady, tired voice, and said that she wasn't in the mood for eating. She slept fitfully until sunset, during which time Link took the opportunity to wrestle the sheep out of the garden, and she rose only to use the chamber pot that they kept for emergencies. She ate a few bites of fruitcake for supper, then went back to bed without a word.

The second day passed much like the first. Her thoughts circled around her garden like a leaf caught in a whirlpool. _Those poor flowers never had a chance. I'm obviously a failure. The only reason why Link sticks around is that his duty to the crown is stronger than the disgust he feels for me. It doesn't matter how much I try, I can't even protect a few vegetables, much less an entire country. Why would anyone expect any more from the princess who couldn't stop the Calamity in time? _

On the third day, Zelda woke to see Link's bright blue eyes staring at her from a few inches away. She flinched back into her pillow and bit back a yelp.

"Goodness, Link, what is it?"

"Come outside with me, please?"

"I never want to see that wretched garden plot again," she mumbled, and buried her head in the pillow.

"You'll have to go outside again sometime. I promise you'll like this!" He pulled back the bedcovers and tugged on Zelda's hands. "Please? Just to see."

"Fine." She sat up and shook the hair out of her face. A headache was beginning to wrap its painful way around the back of her skull. A glass of water was in order before she returned to bed, she decided, and if that wasn't enough, she supposed she deserved to live with the discomfort.

She allowed herself to be led out of bed and out to the garden. As she walked, she kept her eyes trained on a spot directly in front of her feet. When they stopped walking, she looked up from the ground, and an unexpected sight greeted her. Green was replacing brown across the shattered remains of her flower beds, and in the center of it all, a cluster of silent princesses were blooming.

"See?" Link said softly, barely above a whisper. "It's not destroyed, after all."

Zelda gasped in shock and amazement. She fanned her arms over the new growth with a disbelieving gesture, and turned back to Link with questioning eyes.

"I tidied it, but they did the hard work themselves."

She wheeled around slowly, making sure she was ready to drink in all the details of her garden's progress. All over, the plants were throwing out new leaves, tendrils and buds. The damage was temporary. There were some losses— the beans, the armoranth, and the carrots were completely wiped out— but on the whole, the yard was well on its way to recovery. Her heart lifted, not enough to erase the sadness from the slope of her shoulders, but enough to make her realize that her despair was an overreaction. Of course the plants would grow back. That's what they were meant to do. Their dreams were not crushed beneath the sheep's feet and teeth; their goals were limited to reaching for the sky and hoping to be pollinated. Was she going to cry in the autumn, when most of her garden reached the end of its natural lifespan, and the rest of it went into hibernation? She might be back in the castle by then, she realized. She had larger problems to deal with than the growth habits of a motley collection of foraged plants, but as she flinched mentally at her unkind thought, she knew she would miss her garden. When she had to abandon the house for loftier pursuits, she would have to remember to take some time to cultivate more plants somewhere on the castle grounds.

What was it Impa had told her, as they stood on the front porch of her house, watching Link chase Dorian's young daughters up and down the road in a raucous game of tag? The old woman was a veritable fountain of aphorisms, most of which Zelda heard without listening closely to. _Leisure time has its place. Everything has its balance. _Something to that effect, anyway. At the time, Zelda had thought those words were mighty rich, coming from someone who seldom took a break for longer than fifteen minutes, but maybe Impa had said it aloud for her own benefit as well.

Zelda always had trouble with moderation. It was too easy for her to lose herself in her studies, her prayers, or her next big distraction, and she had run away from the one person who kept her in check. Looking over the tender new growth of her latest obsession, she apologized.

"I'm so sorry." She didn't know if she was addressing her plants, Impa, or the world at large.

By her side, Link answered, "I'm sorry I didn't build a fence sooner." He threw his arm around her in a loose hug. "I can start on it after breakfast, if you'd like."

Zelda shrugged off his arm and turned toward the house. "I wish you'd take initiative once in a while," she said with casual, unthinking irritation. "Do you need my permission for everything you do?" She caught his wounded expression with the tail of her eye as she started down the path. _It _is _his house. Why must I bear the responsibility of planning his actions as well as mine? _

Walking briskly to the house, her thoughts turned back to Impa. If she was so concerned with the princess' studies, why hadn't she replied to any of Zelda's letters? If the princess and her progress were so important, then why didn't she warrant so much as a simple response? What was the point of anything she did? No one cared or noticed what she did or did not do any more. Plants grew according to their own needs, people followed their own paths, and Link would be there to shadow her until the end of time, never questioning her motives…

Should it motivate her, to push back against the indifference of an uncaring world?

Zelda felt her mood darkening with alarming rapidity. This was a road easily traversed. Going from glum to miserable, farther down the path to despondency was as familiar as changing her clothes. Bed, she wanted to plunge back into bed and shut out the world around her. No one would notice. No one would care. It might be a petty, inaccurate thought, but her mind was convinced of its certainty.

Stopping at the front door's threshold with one hand on the doorknob, Zelda recalled her meditation training and sighed with shame. She had let her emotions run unchecked again. A few minutes of deep breathing would allow her to separate herself from her frazzled state of mind, and she filled her lungs with cleansing air. She was feeling overwhelmed and unappreciated. This was fixable, if she took the time to confront the causes and ask for help instead of running away from her problems. It wasn't normal to feel worse instead of better when shown the positive progress of the project she had given up on, and she had to stop pushing Link away— all he wanted to do was help her, and she needed to accept his offer.

"Link," she began, not bothering to turn away from the door, as she had heard his footsteps echoing hers on the way back, and furthermore, she wasn't quite ready to meet his no doubt soulful and intense gaze, "I know I've been apologizing to you often these past few weeks, and I'm doing it again. I'm so sorry for the way I've been talking to you, and I've been taking you for granted, as well. You'd do anything for me, and the least I can do is treat you with the respect your selflessness warrants."

She took a few more deep breaths before continuing, "It's not an excuse, but I think I've only begun to realize the strength of my emotions after being disconnected from them for a century. I've got a lot to work on, but I want to try." Her mouth lifted in an approximation of a smile as she turned to look at her patient hero. "And I would like to help you build that fence, if you'll let me."

In response, Link swept Zelda up in an exuberant hug, lifting her off the ground and spinning her around in the air. "Thank you. It's never easy to admit— especially for you— when you're hurt and can't understand." He set her back down on the ground but kept his arms wrapped securely around her.

Surrounded by his warm acceptance, Zelda returned his embrace with as much gratitude as she could muster. They walked into the house as Link began thinking out loud about what they should have for breakfast.

* * *

**A/N:** I don't mean to imply here that you can will yourself out of depression by thinking happy thoughts. I do think that Zelda's moods are governed by circumstances that are within her control, and she is slow to see that she's making her problems worse by isolating herself.

I hope that everyone is enjoying the story so far! Please let me know what you think!


	4. Chapter 4

A week after the sheep incident, Zelda ventured beyond the wooden bridge that connected the house to the rest of the town. She was grateful that Link's house— despite the fact that her papers covered the interior and her garden spread over the yard, she still thought of it as Link's house instead of theirs, and she wondered how long it would take to think otherwise— sat up on a hill on the outskirts of town. The physical space gave her literal and figurative breathing room. She had a bubble of personal space in which she could adjust at her own pace to ease into the bustle of the mortal world again.

She walked down the path toward the center of town, trying to keep her nervousness out of the swing of her arms and the steps of her legs. The sun shone intermittently through the clouds, and she wished she had worn a hat or a hood to protect her eyes, like she normally did when gardening, as her eyes were still unused to the brightness of outside spaces.

Zelda did not have an end place in mind when she began her walk. She was on her own for the first time in over a month, and she was happy just to be comfortable by herself and to discover the town independently. There were several tasks she could complete if she wished to, however. She could visit the general store and stock up on eggs and milk, as they always seemed to be running low on those particular staples. She might walk all the way to the Ancient Tech Lab, since Purah was waiting for her to turn over the Sheikah Slate for a diagnostic check. She knew there was a Goddess statue next door to the Ton Pu Inn, because Link had told her once, probably hoping that it would motivate her to leave the house. The only reason she could think for visiting it, though, would be to rant at it about the uselessness of praying to her own divinity. All those suggestions fell to the wayside as she wandered slowly down the footpath as it joined the main road. Her only priority was to enjoy the stroll.

In the heart of Hateno Town, two women loitered by a long wooden trough that served as a communal washing area, their baskets of laundry forgotten at their feet as they engaged in a lively conversation. Zelda nodded in greeting as the women stopped chatting to watch her walk past. One woman, who towered over her companion, waved and gave her a knowing smile, and the other, whose angry face contrasted sharply with her cheerful lace-trimmed dress, did a double-take before her jaw dropped in apparent shock. Zelda was used to reactions such as these. The entirety of Kakariko Village had a collective heart attack when she and Link showed up there for the first time, despite the advance notice they had sent by way of a traveling merchant, and their arrivals in other towns had similar effects on their residents. However, she did not expect the ladies to wave her over and start peppering her with questions.

"So, we finally get to meet the princess the young hero saved? How did you stand it, being trapped in a mechanical beast for a century?" the tall woman asked brightly.

The angry-looking woman to Zelda's right stood with her hand on her hip and gave her a beady-eyed once-over. "I've never seen a Zora, royal or not, but I thought your kind were more… fishy lookin'. You hidin' your fins under your clothes or somethin'?" she asked as she wiggled her fingers accusingly at the princess.

Zelda was shocked by the women's impertinence, and for a few moments all she could do was gape back at them. She regained her composure to ask in a steely voice, "I beg your pardon?"

Her commanding, icy tone was immediately effective, though not to the degree that she had hoped for. They stood up straight, exchanged a calculated glance, and closed their mouths for a beat before their questions started flowing again.

"Excuse us, Your Highness, but you're Princess Mipha, aren't you? We know that young man who lives up yonder hill is the Champion of Hyrule," said the tall lady, still smiling as if she and Zelda shared a secret.

"And we know how much he loves you, and how you two were fixin' to get married before the Calamity hit—"

Zelda, fuming internally, cut the woman in the lacy dress off before she could finish her sentence. "What are you talking about? How would… how could you even know about such personal matters? Did my knight attendant tell you these things?"

The expressions on the women's faces instantly changed from inviting and interested to shocked and amazed when they heard the phrase _knight attendant _.

"You're… you're Princess Zelda!" the willowy woman breathed, blood draining from her face to return in a fearful blush.

Zelda nodded slowly, not trusting her voice to betray her by cracking in anger. Hateno Village had been near the bottom of their list of places to visit when they spread the news of Ganon's defeat. When they teleported to the Ancient Tech Lab, Zelda had every intention of gathering the residents of the town together to make an announcement, as they had done in every other place, but Purah had been so happy to see her, she insisted on showing her the lab and all her experiments, from floor to ceiling, and the distraction cost them the rest of the day. Link had slipped out after nodding and making politely interested noises for an hour. Zelda didn't even notice his absence, but he startled her with his sudden return when he sidled up next to her in the researcher's private room to tell her that he had tracked down the mayor and told him everything. What she initially took as a load off her mind had transformed into a major oversight, and she wondered how far word of their success had managed to spread, and how accurately. Hardly any of the villagers knew who Zelda was, much less had seen her, and if they had to resort to filling in the blanks with names of other princesses from antiquity, then she had failed her job yet again.

The tall woman stammered an apology while her friend dropped to her knees, not in a crude curtsy as Zelda first thought, but instead to dig around in her laundry basket. She eventually extracted a pair of slim books bound in soft leather. "These are the latest issues of the Rumor Mill." She held them out timidly, waiting for the princess to take them from her. "Please take them and read them… it will explain everything better than we could. And… and don't worry about giving them back when you're finished. Traysi gave each of us complimentary copies."

Zelda took the books and read the gold-embossed words standing out from the dark leather on the front cover. **_A Royal Affair: The Completely True and Unabridged History of the Secret Relationship Between Sir Link, the Hero of Hyrule and Lady Mipha, the Zora Princess. Volume II. An Exclusive Publication from the Rumor Mill._**

Once she made her way through to the end of the extremely detailed title that left no room for wondering what the book could possibly be about, she went back to read the words **_Volume II_**again. _So that must mean… _she thought, and she moved the top book aside to uncover the one below. She saw that it was titled identically, save for the omission of the volume number. A first edition. Volumes one and two, Link and Mipha… what did she have in her hands?

It wasn't much of a secret from her perspective that Mipha had cared deeply for Link, and he in turn had been fond of her. Before the Calamity, he had spent all of his free time away from the castle at Zora's Domain. He didn't speak of his time there, and Zelda had never thought to ask him any prying questions. She had been content to giggle privately at the way Mipha swooned over the hero when the Champions were gathered together. But these books hinted at a deeper bond between them than simply being friends and compatriots. If this was some kind of written record of their relationship, then it might hold the key to unlocking more of Link's memories, if it was as true as it claimed to be. She'd need to read it over by herself first, to see if it lined up with what she knew of the past. It would be confusing and cruel to fill Link's head with gossip and suppositions.

Zelda couldn't go back to the house. Link had told her that he would be in and out all day with various errands he had put off running, and she did not want to be interrupted by the subject of the tell-all rag she was about to read. From her obsessive reading of the map on the Sheikah Slate, she knew of a secluded area ahead, just off the road. Past the shops and the houses, as the road ascended the hill to the Ancient Tech Lab, a grove of apple trees nestled in a crook of the hillside. If she could make it across town before her curiosity ate her alive, she would have privacy there, and a snack too, if her appetite complied.

"Thank you. And— good day to you both," she said curtly to the women still watching her like she was Death Mountain on the edge of eruption. They were her subjects, after all, and here was a chance to show that she was a gracious monarch.

She gripped the slim booklets tightly and set off down the road, feeling the women's eyes on her back as she made her escape. Only a few paces away from the laundry area, she heard their conversation start up again.

"One chosen hero, and two princesses? That guy really gets around— _oww! _"

A thud cut off the first voice, and the second replied, "Shhh, now it's even more romantic! And we'll get to watch volume three fold out right in front of us!"

* * *

Zelda set **_Volume II_**down at her feet, next to a pile of apple cores she hardly remembered eating. Much to her surprise, her appetite remained intact while she likewise devoured the story of Link and Mipha's courtship as told by their correspondence to each other over a period of several years. This would work where the others' journals had failed. True to the publisher's assertions, these were Link's own letters, and Mipha's to him. Reading these extremely personal missives would be sure to uncover more of his memories.

Zelda sighed. This explained so much about the behavior of her Champions that she had glossed over a century ago. That they had been able to hide their true relationship under the guise of their existing friendliness was a testament to their reserved public natures. Zelda had thought the Zora princess to be so pure and innocent, but really, Zelda was the naive one. Link and Mipha had been engaged— they had been lovers! Very… passionate lovers, who had been extremely candid, especially on Link's side, about requesting new things to try in their all-too-brief encounters. It must have been owing to their long familiarity with one another that allowed them to be so free to discuss such personal topics, and to eagerly explore and push their sexual boundaries every chance they could.

The fling he had with Paya she could brush off, as it had been, by Link's own words, casual and spontaneous, and therefore ultimately unthreatening to Zelda. To make plans for a future together, however, spoke of a level of intimacy that Zelda had never achieved with anyone, and this knowledge and the realization of what she lacked was threatening to tear her apart. The hope they shared for the future and the longing they felt for each other was palpable. She couldn't fault Link for loving another, not at that time in their lives, not when she had viewed him as a nuisance at best and at worst, a daily reminder of all she had failed to achieve, but it caused an odd feeling of retroactive hurt and jealousy in her all the same.

Was she ready to marry Link? She couldn't imagine spending her life with anyone else, but the thought of marriage at such a young age seemed a little premature. She had hoped to be able to get the country on the path to sustainability before she tackled the question of her love life, and with the ongoing problem of Link's memory loss, she wasn't sure that he could consent to wed his princess.

Zelda and Link had watched Dark Beast Ganon shrink into a tiny, gleaming, sealed speck in the sky, and she had turned to him and asked him if he remembered her. He had told her that he did, but she knew that he didn't. Not really. He remembered his duty, and he remembered her struggle to harness her powers. He had little more than a dozen scattered recollections of the years they spent together, and apparently nothing of the rest of his life. His childhood. His family. Even how he managed to procure the Master Sword was a mystery lost to time, for when he had done it, the experience marked him with a silence that no one could dislodge completely. Rumors abounded in place of the truth, and stories grew thick and fast in the silence he left.

She wouldn't call him a shell of a man, but he wasn't whole, either. How could he accept a future with her if he was unaware of the choice he was making? Her bright and shining Hero. She adored him, and she loved him fiercely, and she saw quite clearly, through the new experiences and trials that had shaped his life since awakening from his Slumber, that the crystalline center where he kept his inner self remained intact. She just needed a way to access it without shattering it.

Zelda picked the books off the ground, shoved them under her arm so she wouldn't have to look at them, and stood up from the tree stump she had been sitting on. All her ruminating had made her hungry in a way that no amount of apples could sate. It was time to return home. If she walked slowly all the way back, she might be able to come up with a better plan to talk with Link than that of her first childish and unproductive instinct, which was to throw the collection of love letters in his face and cry in bed for a few hours.

* * *

In the morning, Zelda rolled over in bed, reaching for the warm comfort of the man who had slept next to her every night without fail. Her searching hand met nothing but cool sheets and a pillow wadded against the headboard.

_Not a problem, _she thought sleepily. Link often woke early, rising before the sun on most mornings. He was probably downstairs, cooking breakfast, or sharpening a sword. She pricked her ears for the tell-tale scraping of a whetstone, or the sizzling of frying eggs. Silence. She sniffed the air for a whiff of cooking food, but there was nothing. What had woken her then, if not the usual rhythms of the morning? Mere absence could not explain it— she was a rather deep sleeper once she achieved unconsciousness, and a quiet morning was the standard by which she judged all others. She thought back to her moment of wakefulness. A sound. The creaking and closing of the front door. Zelda breathed out in understanding. There was only one thing, or two if the sheep escaped from their pens again, to tend to outside this early in the morning, and Link would be back soon, she was certain of it. His routines were as predictable as the seasons. _I ought to give him a little surprise, _she thought with a giggle. He was so attentive and responsible in the mornings, it was only fair to give him something in return.

* * *

Zelda stood at the head of the table, frowning down at the breakfast she had made for herself and Link. How the fundamentals of cooking had managed to escape her, she'd never know, but it looked like she was serving up a meal of dubious food and garbage picked over by a camp of moblins. Her pancakes, she was sure, were fit for only the hungriest of Gorons. Every one of them had gone, one by one, into the reject pile, and only reluctantly did she sift through them to pick out her best attempts to serve.

The sad stack of blackened flapjacks teetered on a platter in the center of the table, flanked by a bowl of unevenly hacked-at chunks of fruit masquerading as fruit salad, a dish of crispy, slime-covered bits that might have been identifiable as scrambled eggs, and a carafe of freshly squeezed juice, which she estimated was only half full of pulp and pips. Zelda sighed in resignation, pulled out a chair to sit at the table, and loaded her plate with food. Should she wait for Link to come back? He had never missed breakfast before, and he was sure to be hungry when he finally arrived. Her stomach rumbled, betraying her intent to wait. _It is probably best to eat while it's still warm, _she thought, looking down at her plate of misshapen, unappetizing blobs. _They'll be even more inedible otherwise. _

After breakfast, and washing up, and running to the outhouse to relieve herself of her breakfast, and sweeping all the floors, and reorganizing the contents of her single drawer of clothing, Zelda found herself staring blankly out the front window, watching dark clouds gather and flow over the mountain range that rose up on the far side of town. As she worried at the collar of her blouse, she wondered nervously where Link had gone. He had never been away from her for this long, and he must have traveled far, because she could not hear the voice in his sword or sense his spirit. Her free hand patted the Sheikah Slate that she wore on her hip. Where would she go to look for him? There were shrines scattered haphazardly across the width and length of the country, but other than the travel portal in front of the Tech Lab, there wasn't a nearby location to travel to. If she set out on foot, or by horse, any direction she started in was no more than a guess as to where he had gone, and she was unlikely to find him by randomly searching. _Especially if he didn't want to be found, _a voice whispered in the back of her head. That was ridiculous. Why would he hide from her?

Mid-morning gave way to midday, and as Link's absence continued, Zelda's unease curdled into a knot of worry that prevented her from paying attention to her studies. His horse was in the paddock, as she had checked for it multiple times over the course of an hour or so. His weapons were still in their mounts, but that was meaningless, as most of the swords, bows and shields on display were the priceless artifacts of his fellow Champions, and he refused on principle to wield any of them. He hadn't yet returned the Master Sword to the Korok Forest, preferring to keep it strapped to his back whenever he ventured outside, and that was what Zelda looked for and found missing. His adventure pack was gone from its hook on the wall, as well as his cloak, and a bow with its quiver. Basic algebra dictated that Link couldn't have gone far, on foot, without a teleportation device, no matter what her powers were telling her otherwise. Link was probably in Retsam Forest, the nearby grove he had mentioned that was popular for deer hunting. It was silly of her to worry, she told herself. He was perfectly capable of looking after himself, and her concern was an illogical byproduct of all the time they had been spending together. Living in each other's back pockets was not the healthiest dynamic, she knew, and it was only natural that he would need some time alone. She vastly preferred it when he told her about his plans beforehand, like he used to do, so she would remind him of his oversight, calmly, when he came back.

An idea came to Zelda in a flash. She ran upstairs, her footsteps echoing through the empty house, and stopped with a lurch at the bedside table. There was nothing on it now but a stack of books towering over a bud vase that held a cheerful yellow flower, but yesterday, she had placed the two volumes of **_The Rumor Mill_**there as a reminder to use them as the night's shared reading material. Those plans had been set aside for more urgent desires, and she did not have the opportunity to bring up her discovery later, as Link had fallen asleep almost immediately afterwards.

That meant Link was out there, somewhere, reading about the love of his old life as far away from the love of his new life as he could go. She should have told him what she had been given, as soon as she walked into the house yesterday. She cursed her momentary indecisiveness. When she had caught sight of his face as he looked up from restringing his bow and saw the joy light up in his eyes, she thought with a sting of jealousy, _I want to keep that all to myself _, so she went upstairs to put the books away. She wasn't hiding them, she rationalized. She was just waiting for a better time to make itself known. That better time had passed, and in return, she had allowed the situation to slip out of her control.

* * *

Link found Zelda curled up in a ball at the top of the stairs, huddled protectively around an object she held in her lap. The house was cloaked in the premature gloom of an early afternoon thunderstorm, and the sound of the rain hitting the roof masked the creak of the opening door. She heard him take the steps two and three at a time until he reached her level. "Hey, what's wrong?" he asked, in the same gentle tone that he used on skittish horses.

She could feel him hovering nearby. Was he wary of touching her? Afraid she might lash out and scold him like she used to? But when she lifted her tear-streaked, puffy-eyed face to gasp out, "You— you're home!" and burst into a renewed round of tears, he grasped her shoulders and pulled her close to him, brushing the damp hair from her cheeks as he shushed her.

"It's okay. Calm down, you're alright now. I'm here, and I'm listening. Take your time."

It took several minutes for Zelda to find her voice. They sat on the step, rocking gently side-by-side, Link humming a little tune and rubbing Zelda's back, before she gathered her thoughts and began to speak.

"I used to think I was incapable of crying. When I was little, I learned quickly that tears did not bring me any additional attention, and so I stopped showing my pain when I scraped my knee or was thrown from my horse. I didn't cry at my mother's funeral, and I was so _proud _of that. Do you remember how we bonded over our similar ranges of emotional expression?" Her breaths slowed while she laid her head on his shoulder, then quickened before continuing.

"I was able to endure a century of holding back Ganon. It was the hardest thing I have ever done, and yet, when I think back on it, it was strangely easy at the same time. I felt so odd being in that state, not wholly conscious…" She searched for words to describe her experience. She hadn't told anyone what it was like during all those years encased with and containing the Calamity, save for a brief explanation to Impa and Paya that mostly failed to get her point across. "Being locked in a cosmic battle, adrift and somehow both unaware and hyper aware of time passing by… I had succeeded in unlocking my power, it was my sacrifice, my love… but it's not really mine, it's Hylia's power, and I was more of a conduit, a bridge between the divine and mortal realms." Zelda shuddered with her recollection, tongue tripping over words only ever thought and not voiced. "Every moment I kept Ganon in stasis, I was communing with Her. I finally understood what I had to do, and that knowledge comforted me.

"I could wait. No crying, no impatience. I was filled with the certainty that you would come and finish the job you were destined to do, alongside me and my fated role. So I waited. I waited one hundred years for you to wake up. I waited months for you to regain your strength and come to the castle. I waited…" She curled back into herself and stopped talking.

Link slid his hand around to gently squeeze Zelda's arm, holding her closer and supporting her body with the eternal patience he constantly radiated.

In a quiet voice, barely audible over the rain, Zelda started again. "I thought, when the time came, I would have the courage to face what I feared. That there was a solution to every problem. But all I could do was wait. All I still do… is wait.

"I waited for the right time to tell you about the books I was given yesterday, but I waited too long, and you found them on the nightstand without any context. How confusing that must have been for you. I wish I could have been near while you read through them. I waited for you all day, and I can't wait any longer." She looked up and searched Link's face for forgiveness.

"I don't know what it is, but something has to change, because here I am, completely undone after a few hours of separation from you!" She sniffled, clinging to the front of his cloak, and continued in a broken voice, "What is wrong with me? I think my powers are beginning to diminish, because I couldn't tell where you were all day! All that I have been left with is a hole inside myself that fills up with doubt and endless tears. It spills over with hardly a thought! I cry over chewed-up plants and pulpy juice. I fear that you are going to abandon me whenever we part. When will I feel like a whole person again? When will I feel like I won't need to be propped up like a newly planted sapling?"

Zelda's hand went to her lap to lift the object she had been crying against. It was a framed picture of the Champions taken after their induction ceremony. "I think this was one of the last times I felt truly happy. I believed we were on the path to victory, and who among us would deny it? The four most accomplished warriors in the land, along with the hero chosen by the sword that seals the darkness and the goddess-blooded princess. We were destined to win."

"We did win," Link reminded her.

"And look at what it cost us. I wasn't prepared for that price, but you were, and so were they." Zelda circled the faces of her dead friends with a gentle fingertip. "I wish I would have known. I wish I could have done something."

Link spoke up then. "No one can see the future accurately, not even fortune tellers," he said to counter Zelda's quizzical glance. "Prophecies are always misinterpreted, there's at least two crates worth of that stuff downstairs."

Link cradled Zelda's face in his hands and looked at her with eyes that sparkled with sincerity. "I'm sorry I took so long to come back home, and that I didn't tell you about where I went. Reading all those letters—" he looked up at the ceiling for a moment— "was really, really overwhelming. I remembered so much as I read them, and it took me a long time to calm down."

His words cut through her sorrow. He recovered more memories? Her hypothesis was correct, then, but to what extent? Did he remember the contents of the letters, the words blooming to life in his head, or did the memories go beyond mere recollection into synthesis of his present self? In other words, had he changed, emotionally, spiritually, fundamentally, from his experience?

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked, a hint of inquisitiveness audible in her congested voice.

Link shrugged, a mannerism of his that she knew meant _no _, but was too polite to say it outright. "Maybe later, after we've had something to eat. I'm not sure what else there is to talk about, it's all written down in those books, and we've both read them now." It was his turn to look away as he spoke. "The past has come and gone, so it can wait a little longer." Changing the subject, he asked, "What can't wait is your next meal! When was the last time you ate? You said something about pulpy juice— tell me about that downstairs while I fix us a late lunch. Or is it early supper? I can't tell what time it is."

He stood up and squinted out the window at the storm raging outside, then bent to grasp Zelda's hands to lead her down the stairs. Zelda plodded all the way to the kitchen table, watching Link watch her as he walked backwards through the house. Although he declined to talk about his memories, Link kept up an impressive stream of rambling chit-chat as he unpacked meat and vegetables from his bag. He told her about hunting in the forest, and showed her a mushroom he found that had a cap as wide as a dinner plate. Zelda went over her morning's activities, and found herself laughing over her description of the pancakes she had agonized over. Her mood was much improved by the time their meal was ready, and she ate it with a renewed appreciation for her loyal knight.

Some time after eating, they stood in front of a window, locked in an embrace, watching the rain drip down the darkened glass. "When the storm clears, we can pick some apples, and I'll teach you how to make pie," Link said off-handedly to Zelda. "It's more complicated than pancakes, but you're a quick learner, and I'm an excellent cook!"

There was hesitation in his voice when he said, "I have something to show you. We can stay down here, but it doesn't have anything to do with food." He gave her a parting squeeze, then moved to the bag hanging on a hook next to the front door. After rummaging around in it for a few moments, he eventually extracted an article of clothing. It shimmered in the warm candlelight, silver, blue, white, and red; and Zelda thought she saw the same shimmer of unshed tears echo in Link's eyes as he looked down at the material in his hands.

"I— I know what that is. You don't have to tell me," Zelda said, and she crossed the room to lay a comforting hand on his arm. She was passingly familiar with Zora courting rituals, and even if she wasn't, she had been given an overview by **_the Rumor Mill_**. Maybe Link was right. Everything _was _written down, and there was no way to change the past. But that pain radiating off him, that tangible grief… She needed to help him, to heal him somehow, and all she could think of was to talk about it.

"I made a promise to Mipha that neither of us could keep. But I can promise you this: I will remain by your side until I die." Their eyes met, and Zelda could see by the angle of his eyebrows and the set of his lips how his vow took shape on his face— he beseeched her wordlessly to accept what he had to give, and the twist in her heart answered his plea, even as her thoughts hung on his final word. _Die. _

He had nearly died for her once. Could she promise that he wouldn't have to sacrifice himself for her a second time?


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: Sorry this chapter took so long for me to finish! I haven't abandoned it, don't worry! **

**~Content warning for sex and pregnancy scare~**

* * *

He took her, panting and gasping, against the old apple tree in the backyard as they gathered fruit for an afternoon of pie making. One moment, they were searching in the grass for ripe windfall apples left by the previous day's storm, and the next, Zelda was pressed against the knobby trunk of the tree as Link helped her push up her skirt.

She was thankful all her trousers had been too soiled to wear, even for grubbing around in the dirt. Her plain, full skirt which was usually relegated to the back of her dresser drawer provided her with a little modesty, and her oldest pair of underwear, the ones she used to wear beneath her prayer dress, was the only barrier for Link to remove. Urged by her whispered repetition in his ear of, "Now, please, yes," he pulled the stretchy garment to the side and entered her in one swift motion. Who had been more eager for their coupling, she couldn't say, and they shared a sigh of satisfaction.

Zelda had been distracted for minutes, watching Link's hands part the long grass, his nimble fingers probing for hidden fruit. In her mind, those fingers searched for and found a sweeter reward, and she must have made a soft noise, some sound that triggered a like response in her knight. That was all it took sometimes. Link was her favorite and constant distraction. A shared glance; a particular tilt of his head; or the sway of her hips let the other one know, and without prelude they would be all over each other as though the world was ending again.

Once she had gotten comfortable leaving the house again, they made love outside more often than not, and the phrase _making love_ was, more and more, ill-suited to the manner in which they acted. At first, it startled her, then it excited her, and now it started to disturb her.

Would it happen again this time? Currently, Link was making the noises Zelda loved to hear, barely articulated groans that told her he had abandoned his highest level of awareness and was operating on a more primal level. This was usually her cue to follow him. Going from _thinking_ to _feeling_ was a deliberate choice for her, accomplished with some effort, but gladly done under the circumstances. Link was highly suggestible in this state of mind, and Zelda usually took it as an opportunity to lead him to the areas of her body that needed the most attention.

The problem Zelda faced had developed relatively recently. Link was spending less time at the languid, less-conscious level that delighted her so, and would occasionally descend even further into a mindset that opposed the gentle nature that he had thus far shown in their intimate relations. Sometimes he was rough, pinning her down with strong hands and an intense look, pushing her against the bed, or the table, or the large rock they had stopped to rest on during one of their daily walks. He never hurt her, and when she said _stop,_ he always obeyed with a swiftness that showed he was in perfect control of all his faculties. His roughness was measured by fractions of a degree, and sometimes she wondered if she was imagining his change entirely. Other times, he asked her to do things to him, things that ought to hurt, but instead drew out from within him a look of utter bliss. Link so rarely asked for anything outright, that when he requested it from Zelda, she happily obliged. Pleasing him pleased her in return, in no small part because he went out of his way to please her constantly.

The common thread these changes shared was the new look in his eye. It was wild, it was dangerous, and it wasn't focused on Zelda. It seemed to her as though he was looking through her and into another realm, one where she had been exchanged for a lover he no longer had. She never voiced her fears. She dismissed them as paranoia, and in her methodical, analytical way, she tried to determine if his changed behavior correlated with any new stimulus or variable recently introduced. The only thing she could think of was his haphazard discovery of that blasted Rumor Mill book, and she quietly mourned the gradual introduction to the sensitive fragments of his past that he should have had.

Under the dappled shade of the tree, Zelda pushed against its trunk, planting her foot higher against a protruding root so she could swing a leg around Link's waist. This changed the angle where they met, opening her hips and allowing him to penetrate her more deeply. She rolled her hips against his as much as she could, in the lack of space she had, and Link slowed his pace, moving in and out with an exquisite deliberateness that was a heavenly contrast to their frantic, unsteady beginning. She loved to feel every inch of him entering and filling her with such care, and she lowered her chin onto his shoulder, closing her eyes against the sunlight that flashed and shimmered through the leaves.

The side of Zelda's neck was now exposed, and Link took it as an invitation to begin exploring the new territory. He rested his lips against the thin skin below her ear where her pulse beat wildly with excitement, then he opened his mouth, tonguing and sucking the spot until she moaned. The edges of his teeth caught at the tendon standing out from the side of her neck, and her breathing quickened as more than a hint of pressure tightened against her throat. His teeth briefly bore down into her delicate flesh, and she gasped in arousal colored by surprise and a touch of fear.

Cradling the back of Zelda's head with one hand, gripping her thigh to hold it in place against his side with the other, Link changed tempo again, thrusting into her with increased determination. Zelda could not watch the expression take shape on his face. She could only form her impression of his disposition from his impassioned sounds and forceful actions, and the signs so far were inconclusive. She thought —no, it was just a wild hope— that Link knew where he was and who he was with. His behavior would have to increase further before she could say for certain if her worries were justified.

The first time Zelda and Link had sex, they had been camping near the shores of Lake Totori, about halfway through their task of informing the entire country about Ganon's defeat. Zelda was uncomfortable using the Slate to warp into the center of each town unannounced, so Link had come up with the idea of traveling to a nearby shrine or stable that was no more than a few hours away from their destination by horse or Master Cycle. Evening was approaching when they stepped out of Bareeda Naag Shrine's blue teleportation circle, so they decided to set up camp there for the night and make for Rito Village in the morning.

She had taken it for impatience— his and hers alike. After a week of lingering, heated glances and eroding personal boundaries, the time they spent together was long enough for Zelda to get what she wanted— needed— from her knight. And, after more than a century, who would want to wait a few more days for the soft foundation of a bed or the security of walls when the warmth of a fire and double bedrolls were so close at hand. In the wild, there was no one around for miles. No one to stumble upon them, or listen at the door, or crook an eyebrow and wonder at the propriety of the princess and her protector sharing a bed; and if the people they encountered didn't know exactly who she was before they made their announcement, especially once she had obtained a set of camouflaging traveler's clothes, Link was a familiar figure to the denizens of the towns and stables alike. Post-apocalypse or no, people still talked. Zelda could hear the whispers of the court gossip mongers in her ears if she tried, and sometimes, in her dreams, when she didn't try.

She had thought that the location of their lovemaking was unimportant, a byproduct of the situation they had found themselves in, and once they had a permanent roof over their heads, the urge to fuck outside would fade as a passing novelty. But Link's ardor seemed to increase when they were out of the house, and she knew now that it was his preference. Had he always had this desire, Zelda wondered, or did he develop it more recently? When he spent those months out in the countryside, regaining his strength after waking from the Shrine of Resurrection, did his interest shift to performing all his activities outside? Was it a vestige from his youth, growing up in Zora's Domain? Or, she thought with an icy stab of regret and denial, had she inadvertently reawakened buried urges that had died along with Mipha and his memories of her?

After reading how Link had been so open with Mipha about sharing his private likes and dislikes, Zelda had become more motivated to ask him what he would like to do with her. His answer— _whatever you want_— had been sufficient for a time or two, until her doubts about where his attention wandered off to came creeping back again. How could she tell Link that what she really wanted was for him to be fully present while they were intimate? That she was afraid that he was regressing to the silent soldier he used to be, the one who loved another woman?

Zelda had cried that first time they made love. She was not embarrassed to admit it, either crying or calling it "making love". Why wouldn't she cry? They had forged their love there, tenderly, slowly, in that tent that was their home. In fact, both of them had cried, reduced to such a sobbing, snotty mess by the end that they had to heat up a second bucket of water in the cooking pot to clean each other off in a decidedly non-sexy shared bath.

This time, wiping the silent tears from her face before Link could catch a glimpse of them, Zelda was not crying joyful tears of release, comfort, and a lifetime of solitude ending in a crash of desire and fiercely burning, finally requited love. These were bitter tears of uncertainty, of thankfulness that Link tended to grow more incoherent as he neared his climax, because she feared that it wouldn't be her name that passed his lips.

Zelda was familiar with all her knight's subtle nonverbal mannerisms. It was a point of pride for her to notice and mentally catalog each idiosyncrasy he displayed. She especially enjoyed it when she realized that some of his customs carried over from before his resurrection— How the pitch of his rumbling stomach described the acuteness of his hunger, or how his eyes would shift to the side before he started to speak. New signs of his temperament were equally precious to her— How his body would slacken, then jerk, then relax again as he drifted off to sleep each night. Or how his muscles would tense in a wave that started from his core and swept out to his extremities, and his breath would hitch, though he never held it, too trained by combat to ever stop breathing, just as he was doing now, right before he came.

She couldn't stop herself from wondering how much of this Mipha had also known. The Zora princess had mapped Link's body precisely, for his suit of scaled armor fit him like a second skin. Had she mapped his moods and habits with equal care? They had been friends, too, for many years before they had become lovers, and what good friend was not aware of the little details, the quirks and eccentricities that made a person unique?

Zelda and Mipha had been little more than acquaintances when she asked her to be Vah Ruta's pilot. It was far more common for a Hylian delegation to be sent out to Zora's Domain for matters of diplomacy than the reverse, and with Zelda's busy schedule, the princesses had only met a handful of times before work on the Calamity became a priority. Their relationship remained formally cordial as they trained together, and they were never as close as Zelda would have liked to be. She respected Mipha greatly, but always felt as though there was a barrier between them, some reservation the other princess had that caused her to hold her at arm's length, whether in mixed company or by themselves. She had taken it for a cultural difference, or perhaps it was simply in Mipha's nature to be respectfully distant when interacting with fellow royalty. After reading her letters to Link, however, Zelda knew that it was Link himself who was to blame. No, it wasn't his fault, he had just been in an uncomfortable and complicated position, on the receiving end of two sources of affection from two women who loved him.

If anything, it was Zelda's fault, for being the part of the team that dragged everyone down. If she had been faster in unlocking her powers, if she hadn't been so resentful of Link's assignment as her personal guard or Mipha's mastery of both her healing power and her Beast, things would have ended differently. _If only, if only!_

Before she started to tread the well-worn path of what-ifs, she returned to her present situation. Link had stilled inside her. His face was buried in the crook of her neck, and his labored breaths were slowing, puffing warmly against her skin. She lowered her leg, which was still hitched around his waist, then released her hands from where they were clenched in his tunic so she could bring them up to thread her fingers through his damp hair.

"Let's go inside," she said, her heart settling somewhere south of where it usually resided. "I think we have enough apples to make a pie."

Link pushed himself off her and gave her a questioning look.

A little flustered, Zelda let go of Link completely to tuck a stray lock of hair behind her ear, and said, "I'm fine, I'm finished. I mean, I didn't finish, but I don't need to. I'm fine." To stop herself from repeating herself further, she leaned forward and kissed Link on his forehead. "Are you ready to teach me everything you know about pie?" She smoothed down her skirt and picked up the basket of apples without waiting for his reply. "Last one there's a rotten apple!"

Link and Zelda processed fruit in companionable near-silence at the kitchen table. Link sat and hummed as he peeled apples, attempting to keep the skin intact in narrow red curls before popping each ribbon into his mouth. Zelda stood on the other side of the table, accepting the peeled fruits and chopping them into bite-sized chunks. If the pieces were all of similar size, Link had explained, the interior texture of the pie would be consistent and it would cook more evenly. She leaned forward to grab the latest offering from Link's hand when she felt an unexpected wetness seep through her underwear.

_What the…_ She set aside her knife and placed the apple on her cutting board before turning her eyes to Link, and in a voice frozen with uncertainty, she asked, "Link, did you… finish… inside… in me?"

He raised his head from his task, and she watched as a look of dawning comprehension slowly transformed his face. "Uhhh.." he croaked, and swallowed hard before nodding.

_A chair, where was the damned chair?_ Zelda groped behind her for something to sit on before her legs gave out from under her, and found a stool by her ankles. Sitting down in a puff of skirts, she did some mental math. Her cycle, never very regular in the past on account of the astronomical amount of stress she had been living with, had returned about two weeks ago, which meant it would be anywhere from one to three weeks before she bled again, and that was too much leeway to put any faith in her body's natural processes. Reflexively, she thought of her situation only as a problem to solve, pinpointing each individual input and output. Her options were limited. She almost burst into laughter at the thought of praying for divine intervention, and she didn't really think her sealing power worked like that, anyway. The women in town most likely had a folk remedy they used on occasion, but inquiring about such a thing would only give them a new reason to gossip. Her best choice was to make a trip to Gerudo Town and look for an elixir there. Or was it a Sheikah specialty? She couldn't recall what Urbosa had told her so long ago. She knew she had written it down somewhere, but either way, there was a solution to their mistake.

The pale, protruding curve of the peeled apple in front of her served as an anchoring counterpoint to her flying thoughts. It squatted gravidly, mocking her plans, and she knocked it aside with a jerking swipe of her hand. Link, who had been watching her intently, cautiously, grabbed the apple in midair after it rolled off the edge of the table, and asked, "What can we do?"

She answered him firmly, keeping her eyes on the apple. "I need to go to Gerudo Town."

Link placed the apple on top of the pile of chopped bits in the bowl in the center of the table, covered the bowl with a convenient hand towel, and stood up. "Let's get going," he said, wiping his hands on his trousers. "I'll get dressed in my _vai_ clothes, and we'll find a potion shop."

"No," she said, and he froze in place, turned halfway toward the stairs. "I think I should go by myself. Everyone there knows who we are, and they'll start asking questions if they see both of us wandering around town together. If I wear your tourist outfit, I'll blend in better."

Link protested, "Let me go, then." Did he consider a trip to the desert to be unsafe in some way? The nearest shrine was right outside the city walls, within sight of the guards who stood watch beside the gates. Nothing could be safer, or easier, and she told him so. A seed of anger planted itself in her chest as she watched him set his face against her reasoning. _He_ was supposed to _agree_ with her!

Before he could speak up again, Zelda said, "If you go, you'll probably get roped into running errands for half a dozen other women. I know it's in your nature to be helpful, but the most helpful thing you can do right now is to stay home." She watched his beautiful lips open to say something noble yet incredibly dumb, and she looked away. "Just tell me your best guess as to whom I should speak with for finding an appropriate potion shop, and I'll be back before that pie is ready to eat."

Link was silent for so long that Zelda looked back at him, wondering if she had insulted him somehow, or asked him to break a part of his knight's code. The crease between his eyebrows told her that he was struggling with an internal conflict, and the slight slump in his shoulders and the downturned angle of his ears indicated that he had picked the losing side. He raised his hand and flicked his fingers at her, a dismissive gesture she knew wasn't as condescending as it looked, and turned his attention back to the pie ingredients spread across the table. She recalled the oath he had pledged when he had been appointed as her protector, and she realized the amount of self-control he must have gathered to let her go without complaint. She would honor his acquiescence by running her errand as swiftly as she could.

Zelda rummaged through the dresser for Link's silken set of Gerudo _vai_ clothes. He kept the clothing he rarely wore in the bottom drawer, and she finally found them underneath a faintly glowing mask that had been painted to resemble a skull. The brightly dyed pieces of her intended disguise were folded carefully around the accessories that completed the outfit. She dressed hurriedly, slipping rings on her arms and fingers and trying not to notice that, although clean, the fabric retained a hint of Link's scent. She was wearing his clothes, she lived in his house and ate the food he cooked, and now she was fixing his mistake. The last thing she wanted was to be reminded of how good he smelled, but she had to look convincing as a tourist and keep her face covered, so this was her only option.

Back downstairs, Zelda faced Link and told him not to worry, a futile gesture that did nothing to ease the lines of concern from his forehead.

"Are you sure you want to make a decision right now?" he asked.

Zelda raised her hand to caress Link's cheek, aggravation and affection warring in her heart, and nodded. She might not know the exact path her life would take, but she knew she was too young to be a mother. Despite her world-changing responsibility, she was, at her core, a sheltered, teenage princess without a retinue. To entertain any other option was unthinkable, and to allow herself to wonder how her future would turn out by throwing the added complication of another life to tend to threatened to call forth that wave of crushing exhaustion that came whenever she thought about extremely uncomfortable life decisions. Her fingers twitched against Link's skin, and she instantly removed her hand, lest it slap his face on its own accord. Shocked by her intrusive thought, she distracted herself by releasing the Sheikah Slate from the beaded belt on her hip.

"Please," she said through gritted teeth, "show me where I should begin my quest."

* * *

Down a narrow, dusty alley, where the proprietor of the Gerudo Secret Club sent her, the bustle of the central market faded to a low hum as Zelda arrived at a nondescript, unpainted wooden door. On a post next to the door hung an equally nondescript sign that read _Elixir Fixation_.

On the journey through town, Zelda had stopped thinking about Link's part in the debacle and began to berate herself for allowing her attention to slip and getting them into the mess in the first place. She knew what he was doing, didn't she? She had to have known— she was usually perceptive to his signs of impending climax, so she must have let it happen. It might not be fair to shoulder all the blame, but it helped her feel more secure if she gave herself the task of being vigilant over both of them. Properly chastened, she squared her shoulders, opened the door, and entered the potion shop.

"_Vasaaq_. What can I get for you today?" came a lightly accented greeting from the proprietor as Zelda stepped into a small space left for customers in front of the counter. The shop was most accurately described as a hole in the wall, thought Zelda as she looked around, although it was a bright and nicely decorated one at that.

Behind the merchant, a shallow alcove was carved from what was probably the main outer wall of the city. The space was fitted with shelves from floor to ceiling, and on those shelves, bottles of all shapes, sizes, and colors glinted in the light of the single tiny window. The store was immaculate, and not a mote of dust was visible on the merchandise, lending it an air of high turnover, or alternatively, indicating that the shopkeeper had nothing better to do than compulsively dust while waiting for customers.

Zelda nodded her head in a distracted greeting as her attention was caught by a large jar of what appeared to be pickled eyeballs on the top shelf. She swallowed the cold lump of anxiety that was her constant companion, and said, "It's quite lovely in here. Do you own this shop?"

The merchant's polite smile widened into something a shade more friendly, and she answered, "It's a family affair. My mother has been running the business since she was my age, and my sister and I take turns between standing behind the counter and gathering ingredients for the potions that my mother brews. After so many years, my mother prefers to work behind the scenes, and it helps that most young _vai_ find it easier to speak with someone closer to their age."

The conversational tone of the tall woman on the other side of the narrow counter put Zelda's mind at ease, despite the nature of her visit and the close quarters they shared. She had a feeling that her questions would be happily answered, but instead of plunging in headfirst by pointing at the mysterious jar of eyeballs and asking what on earth they were used for, she fiddled with the fringe on the sash that was slung around her hips and asked, "How's business?"

"Excellent," the Gerudo replied, resting her hands on the countertop. "Most everyone in town, and quite a few _vai _from out of town, comes here for one reason or another." She straightened up and gestured to a shelf high on the wall of faintly glowing potions, grouped together by color. "Our best-selling products are these. We carry a full range of ability enhancing and protective elixirs. Many women prefer to distill their own at home, but take it from me, ours are crafted from the highest quality ingredients, both locally sourced and imported, in a carefully controlled and clean environment. Would you trust a healing elixir you whipped up in a communal cooking pot? The enhanced effectiveness and peace of mind are worth the extra cost."

"Sorry," she continued with a deep chuckle, "My saleswoman's pitch snuck in there. You don't look like the kind of _vai_ to be swayed by slick words, but it's a hard habit to break."

Zelda recognized the distinctive, fluorescent yellow hue of electro elixir, and further along the shelf, she noted a cluster of bottles that most likely held a potent form of cold-insulating potion, judging from their deep color.

"Are those cold elixirs?" Zelda pointed to the blue bottles she was studying. "The safflina must have been very fresh to obtain that color when your mother prepared that batch."

The merchant's face eased into an appraising grin, and she cocked her head to the side. "You're not here for an ordinary potion, are you? Usually I'm telling the customer little tidbits like that, not the other way around!"

Zelda blushed and stammered, "Well, I... I would say I have a theoretical understanding of basic potion making, but I..." Her hands flopped uselessly at her sides. It was unbecoming of a princess to boast, she knew, but they were having such a pleasant and stimulating conversation, and she didn't want it to end just yet.

"Don't sell yourself short, my friend. There's no shame in being knowledgeable, especially about something so useful."

"You've never met my father," Zelda said without thinking. "He — he discouraged curiosity for its own sake." She pressed her lips together tightly behind her veil. She had not thought of the old king in days, and the memory of his repeated admonitions to focus on her prayers was enough to bring a prickle of shameful tears to her eyes.

The merchant nodded her head thoughtfully. "It's all too common for a family member to overlook one's strengths."

After a stretch of silence, during which Zelda looked resolutely at the jar of eyeballs and blinked until her vision cleared, the Gerudo merchant resumed her explanation of her wares. She pointed to a series of shelves that held a wider array of bottles than the ones above. "These are our specialty." She waved her hand back and forth in front of a row of bottles filled with an appetizing variety of softly colored liquids. "A full line of elixirs catering to the health of _vai_ at every stage of life." She pointed at each selection as she went down the line, describing them quickly and precisely. "These are popular among _vai_ newly with child. This one strengthens the womb, this one gets rid of morning sickness, and this one is a general tonic for both expectant mother and baby."

A large jar, filled with liquid the color of watery porridge, was pointed out next. "This one here helps new mothers make more milk for their _vehvi _if they struggle. This one eases the pain of monthly bleeding. These over here cool hot flashes and hot thoughts." She paused to look back at her customer, and said with that same friendly, comforting smile, "I've got more, lots more, but if you're looking for something specific, let me know and I'll stop blathering on. Otherwise, I've got all the time in the world for the only customer in my store. I'm always happy to answer questions, and I love to talk shop."

The temptation to launch into a deep investigation of the methodology of potion making was strong, and Zelda laughed a little, enough to set her veil fluttering against her lips. "Thanks for the invitation, but I am on a... time sensitive errand. I'm looking for, um, a way to prevent an… unintended pregnancy." she said, ending with a nervously trilled laugh. She was thankful that they were conversing in Hylian. The Gerudo she had learned was useful mainly in diplomatic situations, and did not include any of the specialized vocabulary she needed to ask for what she wanted.

"Mmm hmm," the merchant said softly. "I sell two kinds." She turned to pluck two bottles from a shelf at knee height, and placed them on the counter. "This one," referring to a small opaque bottle, "needs to be taken the same day as the incident. It's a good one to keep by your bed for those emergency situations. Twenty-five rupees per vial. And this one is taken once you know you're with child, but before you feel its movements." She gestured at the larger translucent bottle filled with chalk white liquid. "Seven hundred and fifty rupees." Almost as an afterthought, she added, "We also sell an elixir, taken daily, for the long-term prevention of pregnancy. Since it needs to be brewed fresh every day, like tea, we only sell the dry ingredients. Would you be interested in purchasing some of that, as well?"

Zelda sighed in relief. "I'll take five of the vials, and a month's supply of the tea." _But what if... Just in case..._ "And one of the white ones, too." She grabbed the small beaded purse that hung over her shoulder, which matched the rest of her outfit and substituted for Link's much heavier wallet, and started counting out rupees in neat rows on the counter. "I should have exact change…" She fished out the last red rupee from the bottom of her purse and placed it with the others. "Here you go."

In the twinkling of an eye, the saleswoman swept the money off the counter and laid down a few sheets of thin paper in its place. "I'll wrap them up for you." With precise movements, she wrapped each bottle in a layer of paper, then rolled the whole bundle up in a colorful cloth. Before tying it up, she slipped a few small cards inside. "The instructions for each elixir are written on the cards. Pay close attention to what they say, because we don't give refunds if they don't work."

"Thank you very much," Zelda said, and grabbed her package with both hands. She turned to leave the shop, then hesitated. "I have one last question. What is that jar of eyeballs used for?"

The merchant answered with her widest smile yet. "Those are my sister's favorite snack! Candied keese eyes. Would you like to try one?" She moved eagerly, but Zelda stopped her just as she was raising her arms to bring the jar down from the shelf.

"No thank you, that won't be necessary. I am afraid my curiosity does not extend to learning what they taste like!" _Maybe Link should have come along,_ she mused. _He'd eat one without asking twice. _She left the shop, questions answered and her purchase tucked under her arm.

Sitting on a crate in a storage cache built into the city's wall much in the same way as the shop she had just left had been constructed, Zelda unwrapped the brightly colored cloth that held her bundle of elixirs and spread it out on her lap. She picked up the instruction cards, skimming over the words on each piece of paper until she found the correct one:

_Fast Acting Elixir for the Prevention of Pregnancy_

_Instructions: Drink one vial on an empty stomach. Must be taken on the same day (or night) as the incident. Do not take more than one vial in a 24-hour period._

_Side effects include headache, vaginal dryness, and constipation._

_Do not take if allergic to razorshrooms._

"Sounds simple enough," said Zelda to herself, and selected one of the small vials at random. Before she let her doubts creep in, she removed the protective paper from the elixir and popped the cork. She drank the faintly bitter, metallic tasting contents in one swallow, tilting her head back to make sure she got every last drop. Returning the empty bottle to its fellows in the cloth, she wrapped the elixirs back up the way she had seen the merchant do it, and stepped out of her resting place. The buzz of the central market was much louder here, and Zelda turned her head longingly to follow the street that led into the heart of the city. She sighed, shifting her package into the crook of her left arm, and unhooked the Sheikah Slate with her free hand. She had been gone long enough, and she didn't want to give Link any more reason to worry. Bringing up the map function on the Slate, she scanned her surroundings for anyone watching, and once she was sure she was alone, she pushed the button that sent her flying home in a flurry of electric blue lines.


	6. Chapter 6

Mealtimes were never a silent affair at the little house in Hateno Village. Zelda managed to coax more words from Link while he cooked than at any other time of the day, which surprised him, as he used to think he had to concentrate too much on preparing and cooking the food to carry on a conversation. He was happy to be proven wrong in this regard, although he had a suspicion she kept him talking through the meal to slow his eating down to a normal speed. Zelda often complained, her good-natured tone mixed with a hint of exasperation, that he ate much too quickly, and, more than once, he heard her mutter under her breath, wondering if he even tasted his creations as he inhaled them. One time, he had made the mistake of saying that all his table manners had been lost along with his memories, and ended up with a face full of mashed root vegetables, followed by a wadded-up napkin, for his impertinence.

Link was very familiar with this meal's topic of conversation, as it was one Zelda liked to revisit regularly, returning to every now and then after exhausting more interesting avenues of discussion. The issue of his persistent memory loss was more concerning to the princess than it was to him, and after their first experiment proved to be just as much of a success as the traumatic experience of reading his old love letters had been, Zelda had thought long and hard about their next avenue to pursue in the matter of restoring Link's past. They discussed several options, none of which seemed satisfying or likely to work for one reason or another. She kept a small notebook near her at all times to jot down ideas upon whenever they struck, and this she consulted over the evening's meal of poultry curry.

"Here are the most recent ideas we have put forth in regards to the topic of restoring your memory. One: Dragons. Rejected because after seeing all three, and _attempting to ride one, _you were left inwardly unchanged." Link protested silently at her assertion. He had learned a valuable lesson, one that had immediately and permanently changed his outlook on the mythical beasts after his encounter with Farosh. Dragons were for looking at, not for touching, if one wanted to remain whole in both body and spirit. "Two: Eating a favorite meal. Attempted and still ongoing, no results yet."

Link waited until she had taken another bite of food before responding, "That idea's my favorite," he said to her upraised eyebrow. "Maybe I should ask around town for old cookbooks."

Zelda gave a thoughtful hum and dropped her spoon to add a note to her list. "Three," she continued. "Ask Purah for help. Not attempted, because she derails every conversation I have with her by bringing up how expensive her research is. When I visit her lab, she drags me over to the wall of bills she's been adding to for a century, and I... I just can't see the point in asking her to lend a hand with this before I have a steady source of income, with a treasury department and a treasurer to run it, so that idea can be shelved for the immediate future."

"Snap snap," said Link, mimicking the researcher's high voice and earning a tiny smile in return. "It's a wonder she didn't put a calculator function on the Sheikah Slate so I could figure out what I owed her on the go."

"Let's keep that idea between us, shall we?" Zelda responded, her smile widening. "I don't need Purah getting inspired by an off-hand comment." She ate a small spoonful of rice, chewing for a long time before speaking again. "Four: A trip to Hyrule Castle, now that it has been cleared of Malice. Rejected temporarily because of the building's extensive structural integrity issues. It is unfortunate that the Malice was the only thing keeping most of the upper floors of the castle together. This idea has a lot of promise, especially once rebuilding gets underway. You must have made a few noteworthy memories there, or perhaps in Castle Town."

Zelda paused her recitation to let Link respond. He wasn't as certain as she was about his ability to regain more memories. It seemed to be a matter of chance as to whether a place or experience managed to unlock part of his past, and deep down, he was fine with plodding along, discovering more of his past —or not— at an unhurried pace. He had concluded months ago that if he never regained any more of his memories and was left to rebuild his life as a recovering amnesiac, he could live happily with his new identity. Zelda, though, was taking his inconsistent results personally, and with every failure her behavior grew more erratic. Her passions flowed close to the surface, growing alternately hot or cold with the consequences of their actions and the contents of her surroundings. This was something that he loved about his princess. It made her a lively companion, but her increased periods of emotional fragility and melancholy were beginning to concern him, so in order not to push her into a state of downheartedness, he nodded in agreement. "That makes sense," he added, to make sure she knew he was listening.

Having come to the end of her list, Zelda returned her attention to her supper. Link watched her as she ate with absent-minded leisure, with most of her concentration still fixed on their intractable problem, and tried to match his eating to the speed at which she raised and lowered the spoon to her own lips. He thought to offer some light observation on the quality of the curry powder he had used, but when he began, "I remember—" and Zelda snapped to attention, her breathless and inquisitive concentration focusing on what was to be a humorous anecdote from his last trip to Goron City instead of a soul-baring confession related to a lost memory, he wilted under her hopeful expression and muttered a few words about keeping spice jars away from open lava flows before stumbling to an end, and they continued to eat, the thick silence of dashed hopes hanging over their heads.

"Oh, oh!" An exclamation from the princess broke the quiet in the room. Zelda's eyes went wide, and she banged her fists down on the table. Link recognized the obvious signs of a new idea springing into her head. "What about— Oh yes, that should absolutely— I've got it this time! Link, listen to this. I've got another idea, and I think this one will really work!" Her eyes shone with excitement as she leaned over the table.

"If we replicate the circumstances that led to your loss of memory, we might be able to bring it back! Not only fragments, but the entire thing!" she began to explain.

Link's half-swallowed bite of squab lodged painfully in his throat as his comprehension caught up to his hearing, and he thought for a shocking moment that she meant to bring him to the brink of death again, but she continued to talk over his horrified silence.

"You should go back into the Shrine of Resurrection!" Zelda unveiled her idea like a work of art, but it was all he could do to sit calmly and not flinch back from her words. _She does want to kill me, _he thought. _No, she wouldn't go that far. _But there was only one use for the ancient medical device that he knew of, and only one way to activate it.

Some of what he was thinking must have expressed itself visually, because the next words out of Zelda's mouth were ones of reassurance. "I'm not talking about activating it, of course, that's a little extreme… but what if we brought a bucket to haul water with, and a fire rod to warm up the water, and we refilled the healing pool, and you… got in it and meditated for awhile?" Her smile was warm and inviting, like she supposed the prospect of soaking in a high tech hot tub must sound, but it did nothing to calm the fears that began to whisper in the back of Link's mind.

"A soothing experience, as close to being suspended in the Sleep of Restoration as we can make for you. Think of it, Link! Floating peacefully in the dark, communing with the technology that saved you and rebuilt your broken body over so many years. Maybe, if we compensate her for her time beforehand, we can ask Purah to come along with us! I imagine she will have some tips that can make it even more effective…" She trailed off, food forgotten and spoon wobbling in her slackened hand as she sat back in her seat and continued her thought process silently.

Link had gone back to the shrine only by necessity, when the call of Zelda's imperious voice had compelled him to return for yet another test of his heroic ability. Walking into the passageway that led to the Chamber of Resurrection had seemed like entering a portal into a dangerous new realm, and his fears had been justified when he grasped the ancient weapon on display and felt the life drain from his body. It was a twin feeling to the harrowing sensation of not being fit to wield the Master Sword, and after his vitality had been returned to him he swore he'd never feel that way again, at least not intentionally. He had steered clear of the mysterious statue that lived down the road from their house for the same reason. Augmenting his essence was one thing, but tampering with it, which hurt more thoroughly, although for a shorter time than other magical ways of draining his life force, was another. He preferred to keep his essence untampered with, thank you very much.

Just the idea of going back to the shrine filled him with an uneasy tingle of dread that he knew would only get worse the closer he got to it. He would do it, of course, he would make an honest effort despite all his doubts telling him it wouldn't work. He would do anything for Zelda, especially if she thought it would help him, but he thought it might be more effective and less traumatic if he could convince her to begin the experiment from a more neutral starting ground. If pressed, he would tell her why he rejected her idea, but he didn't want to come right out and admit that he was struggling with the shame of not wanting to confront his fear. It shouldn't even be a consideration— he should be able to plunge right into that cave without a moment's hesitation— but here he was, squirming in disgrace under the watchful gaze of the woman who had no choice but to believe in him and looked up to his courage like a beacon in the dark.

Underlying his fear and shame was a hot ember of carefully banked anger. Merely talking about going back to the place where his mettle had been tested over and over only to be found lacking would not disrupt his mood, but actually going through with the plan might peel back some of the protective layers he'd thrown over his dissatisfaction with the society that never seemed to be satisfied with his prowess. He only recalled a few times throughout his life when doubts about him surfaced, but the incidents all shared the same exhausting framework. The muttering among his fellows and superiors would become too loud to ignore, and he'd had to prove himself worthy of his accolades all over again. His quiet competence had temporarily silenced them, first as a little boy who bested full-grown knights, then as a youth barely into his teens who was chosen by the Sword that Seals the Darkness, and again as the hero selected to guard the princess as they prepared to battle the Calamity. It was one thing to grow as a person, reaching for and achieving new skill levels and training to maintain that edge, but it was another thing entirely to struggle under the weight of other people's continued disbelief and ultimately fail in the most important task of his life. And then, after his failure and resurrection, he was forced to wrest back his skills and vitality from the ancient Sheikah monks in a time-wasting display of capability stretched across a hundred stupid shrines. He was tired of being doubted, down to the marrow of his bones and the pit of his soul, and he was tired of being reminded of it. It would be an overwhelming relief to either be believed once and for all, or be forgotten and fade into the mists of legend.

Link interrupted her ruminations with a single word. "No."

Zelda's eyes, shadowed with dark smudges left by her recent sleepless nights, returned to examine Link with a perceptive squint. "No?" she said with careful neutrality. She had been exceedingly polite to him during the past two weeks, occasionally returning to the brittle, arrogant persona that she drew around her like a cloak in times of stress, and which he remembered from his first few months accompanying her as her knight attendant. He didn't think she was angry at him, but he could see the unrest simmering beneath her surface. "Do you have an alternative in mind? This list of rejected ideas is long enough, and I'd like to make at least one attempt to retrieve your lost memories before the end of the month." The dissatisfaction with the current state of her life seeped into her speech, and ignited the guilt he felt for his part in her unhappiness.

Link didn't want to upset Zelda or dismiss her idea outright. There was solid reasoning behind her idea, he could see that clearly, and he wanted to give her constructive criticism. He could tell that her patience was wearing thin as she twitched and sighed on her chair, waiting for him to explain himself. He remembered the effect of his stony silence on her mood, but before he could speak, he needed a visual aid. The princess needed a victory, and her hero knew how to give it to her. He held up one finger, a plea of patience burning in his eyes, and he got up from the table to retrieve the Sheikah Slate from its place on the desk upstairs.

Pulling up a chair next to Zelda's seat, Link turned on the Slate and selected the map. "You said I should spend some time in warm water. What if we skip a few steps and go to the source– hot springs!"

Zelda looked at Link, her irritation fading as success and interest spread across her features, and she began to think aloud. "I suppose you may be onto something. But why not begin in the wash tub? Oh, of course not— it's too small to float in. Then again, there is that trough in town that folk use to wash their laundry in. I imagine you would fit in that! But we'd draw a crowd, and privacy is vital to maintain for the duration of this experiment." She tapped her finger thoughtfully against her cheek and slid the Slate in front of herself. "Warm water and a meditative atmosphere are our fundamental concerns," she reiterated, "and there are quite a few hot springs to choose from!" Her fingers flicked over the screen, sending the section in view flying to the very edges of the map. "Eldin has the most," she said in a thoughtful tone, zooming in on Death Mountain. "Hot water and hotter air sounds more like a recipe for poaching eggs rather than for recalling memories, don't you think?" She raised her eyes to see his encouraging smile, then went back to search for more likely spots. "Oh, here are some _secret _hot springs, up in the Hebra Mountains. None of them are close to any shrines, so it would be quite a trek to get to one of those…"

Link nudged the Slate back towards himself and twiddled his fingers on the screen. He located an area just to the northwest of Hateno Village and zeroed in on a tiny, unnamed patch of bright blue water nestled in a hollow between Meda Mountain and Breman Peak. It checked all the boxes, and what was more, it was only a few hours' ride away from home.

"You're a genius, Link, it's perfect! But if you knew it was here all this time, why didn't you just tell me?" She shook her head in apology. "I don't mean to scold you. Let's go there tomorrow!"

* * *

They set out for the mountain spring early in the morning. Zelda clung tightly to Link as they sped along the western road out of town on the Master Cycle, which was the hero's own miniature Divine Beast fashioned in the shape of a horse that rode on wheels. He could feel her sweaty palms through the front of his shirt, and he could also feel the excited thump of her heartbeat against his back over the vibrations of the bike's engine as they raced down the road. Anything faster than the speed of a horse's gallop took some getting used to, and it had been long enough since the last time she had been on it to lose her feel for it.

They had argued the previous night over whether to go by horse or by Master Cycle. Zelda wanted to prepare for a multi-day trip, complete with a tent and bedrolls, provisions to last a week, and a fresh notebook to write her observations in, which necessitated the extra carrying capacity of their horses. Link favored an in-and-out approach. With the basics carried in his bag, and extra weapons strapped to their backs, they'd be out all day and back home by dinner.

Zelda had been taken aback by his uncharacteristic attitude. "I'm surprised you're not champing at the bit to get out of the house and have a little adventure! What's your hurry to get back home?"

So wrapped up was he in his certainty they were chasing another dead end that he never considered turning their excursion into a vacation from their current routine, but once it had been pointed out to him, he had agreed with Zelda's viewpoint. They compromised by strapping saddle bags packed with camping gear to the sides of the Master Cycle.

When the road curved off to the north and away from the hills it had been running alongside, they abandoned their transport, transferring the bags to their backs, and hiked the rest of the way to their destination. The last half hour of their journey was the hardest. The hills they ambled over sharpened into cliffs that stalled their progress, and they scrambled over boulders and zig-zagged up steep inclines in a circuitous route to their destination.

All throughout their hike, Link's thoughts were on Zelda, and how quickly their relationship had grown in complexity. Not for the first time did he think they entered a physical relationship too early. It had been impossible to resist her advances, nor did he want to. They had spent so much time by themselves, it was bound to happen. With no authority over them, no guardian, no father, no court or council to tell them to wait, they didn't, and now they had to navigate the consequences of their actions similarly by themselves. It was a terrifying freedom to make their own mistakes, though it didn't sit right with him to call what they were searching for a mistake. Maybe the timing was off, but the intention was sincere. He loved Zelda, and Zelda loved him. Her love was a balm to his soul. It seeped, warm and golden, into the cracks of his heart, and only occasionally did it feel like a glimmering web of deceit, spun out of misguided affection for a fellow survivor— or a goddess-touched companion. He dismissed these feelings as soon as they popped up, considering them to be by-products of his fragmented memory. He didn't need to add to the already prodigious amount of guilt he felt by examining the stability of his most important extant relationship.

Link carried the blame for the incident under the apple tree, even though Zelda had made sure to take action and accept further responsibility for the aftermath of his mistake. It was a momentary oversight when he allowed himself to release his seed inside Zelda. He knew it was no excuse, but he had felt so _good _during those final moments. Too good to stop, too carried away by her full-bodied grip on him, and how _hot _and _right _she felt around him as he buried himself so deeply within her, and then that voice in the back of his head whispered—

_You can't get her pregnant. She's a Zora— _

And before he could argue the point, it was too late, and his bodily functions had taken over in an overwhelming wave of pleasurable, unstoppable release. That mistaken voice was a fleeting blip, immediately forgotten and pushed aside by his orgasm, and he hadn't been aware of his errant reasoning until Zelda had brought it up midway through making the pie.

It was, quite possibly, the worst timing for a baby that they could have picked. They were so young, and unwed, and Zelda was hiding from the world under the guise of studying for her eventual whatever it's called. Link wasn't even sure if the princess knew she was running from her responsibilities, but he had figured it out when he watched her break down over the destruction of her garden some weeks ago. And here he was, adding to her stress by making her go through all the trouble of tracking down the necessary elixirs for his mistake. He cursed the tiny, extremely irrational, minor part of his decision making process that felt bad about the decision they made.

She hadn't had her monthly flow yet, but as she explained, it might be a few more weeks before it came. They put all their faith in the Gerudo elixir, and only time would tell if it worked. Meanwhile, the days ticked by in an escalating grind of tension and joyless release as they waited for something to change. Link hoped the scientific expedition would help in that regard, while also wishing that the trip would be a total bust. He didn't even try to reconcile his hypocritical viewpoints— he just thought about something else until his guilt dissipated.

At the spring, they shrugged off their packs and propped them against one of many convenient rocks. Link wasted no time in preparing for the experiment, stripping down to his undershorts before Zelda could prompt him to do so. Zelda removed a cloak and her notebook from one of the bags, and after an appreciative glance at Link's mostly unclothed form, took off on a slow walk around the perimeter of the spring, writing down her observations before the experiment began. At the rock-ringed edge of the shoreline, Link waited for Zelda to come back before getting in the water.

It was a cool, overcast day. Clouds scudded low overhead, covering the peak of the mountain before them. The air felt thick, like it was insulating them from the rest of the world. Birdsong trilled from the solitary tree that leaned over the water's edge.

Zelda's voice floated over to Link from across the water. "Sixty-two degrees, with a forecast of clearing clouds… no, make that rain… ugh, the weather sensor keeps changing. I thought Purah fixed it when I brought it in for a diagnostic check… cannot be its normal operation…"

A damp breeze ruffled the surface of the spring and blew against Link's exposed skin. If he stood there for much longer, without moving and not entering the water, he'd start to get cold, but the wind felt nice and refreshing after their strenuous hike.

"Water temperature, one hundred-three degrees. I can't wait until the experiment is over and I can join you for a dip in this delightfully warm water!" The scratchy sound of her pencil scribbling on paper carried through the humid air.

Link shut his eyes and tried to clear his mind in preparation for the task ahead, and waited for Zelda to finish her circuit of the spring. His stomach seized in a fit of nervousness, and he realized he was afraid the plan was going to work. The memories he had already recovered by himself and with Zelda's assistance told the story of a different young man, one who was bound, marked, and oppressed by duty, one who felt only tangentially similar to the true hero who he thought he had grown into, one whose life felt cramped and was studded with too much loss to handle with dignity. Memories couldn't drag him back into the past, could they? Simply having more information about who he was then wouldn't change who he is now, would it? He didn't want to go back to how he used to be, but he didn't know how to tell that to Zelda without irreversibly disappointing her.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" said a voice very close to his ear. Link's eyes flew open and he saw Zelda standing by his side, pencil poised above her notebook and an expectant smile on her face. "I have recorded the initial conditions. I believe everything is ready for the experiment to begin. All that's left is for you to jump in!" She had that 'taste the frog, Link' look in her eye, and Link, never one to disappoint his princess, walked into the spring and lowered himself into the steaming water without delay.

He floated on the surface of the spring, eyes closed and holding still but for the minute movements of his hands to keep him away from rocks and patches of pond weeds. He heard the tinkle of a Korok propeller, distorted and faint, through the slosh of water in his ears. It was easy enough to float if he arched his back and took shallow breaths, and he suddenly thought of his Zora armor. Swimming was effortless when he wore the buoyant set of greaves, helm, and close-fitting shirt made of scales, but if he dressed himself in his Zora suit, it would no doubt raise questions he did not want to answer. Furthermore, he thought it would raise corresponding memories of Mipha, and those he was equally unwilling to face. He had spent a lot of energy detaching himself from his emotions, energy wasted each time he recalled a memory and it ended up uncovering another sensitive, heart wrenching, precious moment of their time together. It was difficult to wear his betrothal gift on a normal day— it wrapped around his chest like the ghost of Mipha's embrace— so on a day like today, when he was inviting his memories to return, it would be unbearable.

The hot water supporting him and the cool breeze blowing over him created an environment that was remarkably similar to the Shrine of Resurrection's. He trained his mind on that feeling, resisting the clamoring call of his past lover, and thought back to the confusing time when he had woken up, whole-bodied but empty-minded, in a pool of glowing blue water. His last moments of consciousness before he succumbed to his wounds on Blatchery Plain while defending Zelda's life mixed in his mind with his first moments of consciousness after being awoken from his sleep of restoration in a disorienting, terrifying dreamscape. Zelda's voice surrounded him, first pleading, now screaming, then soothing, a cacophony of distressed and panicked supplications swept away by the clicks and whirrs of ancient machinery and the gurgle of water draining below him.

"Do you remember anything yet?" The princess' yell broke his concentration like a Goron cannonballing into the shallows, and he jolted upright with a splash, treading water so he could tell her with all sincerity that he felt uncomfortably close to being dead.

"Great! It's working already!" She wrote a few notes in the journal balanced in her lap. "I'm pleased with the progress you are making so far! Continue, please. Dunk yourself again and maybe you'll get farther than your death!"

"Actually, I think I'm ready to take a break,"' he called back, and was rewarded with a disbelieving look. Zelda dismissed his request before he could tell her that he was attempting to joke with her, and she leaned over her notebook so her frown was visible from a distance.

"Your body remaining fully submerged in the water is the whole point of us being here, Link." She enunciated each word distinctly. "Were you paying attention to anything I was saying earlier?"

He nodded, wet sections of hair slapping him in the face with the intensity of his response. Of course he had been paying attention. He couldn't stop himself from mentally recording every word and move she made while he was around to notice them. He saw the way she wound herself up, tighter and tighter, despite the relaxing influence of her new gardening hobby, and he worried that she was pitching herself headlong into a problem that was larger and more complicated than either of them could handle.

"Are you trying to remember? Or are you holding back? If you can't concentrate here, we can always relocate to the Chamber—"

"No," he interrupted, but what question was he answering? He'd be able to concentrate if she'd stop badgering him, but he couldn't tell her that. "Did you ever feel anything the moment you stepped into a spring?" he asked instead, and immediately regretted it.

Link watched as Zelda wrapped her mental cloak of haughty emotional distance around herself and hissed through narrowed lips, "You do realize I'm trying to help you, don't you?"

There was no use trying to explain his way out of his poor choice of words, so he apologized. "I'll try again, I just need more time." He reclined into the water, sighing with poorly concealed patience, and he covered it by sinking below the surface for a few seconds. He was doing this for her. He ought to be ashamed of himself. He was capable of using more self control than the paltry amount he was displaying, and it wasn't as though this was the first unpleasant thing he had ever dealt with in his life. He just needed to focus on something, anything really, something that didn't remind him of death and pain and loss. He raised his face back into the air, took a deep breath, and thought about floating in an empty void.

Floating was boring. Link preferred swimming to floating, hands down. Swimming was his second favorite physical activity, right behind sword training and ahead of rock climbing, and it made him feel almost as happy as cooking did. He loved the feel of the water as he slid through it, and he loved its cool embrace, whether it was buoyant and salty or clinging and fresh. The water felt alive, cradling him in the calm shallows of a lake or far south in a coral-ringed lagoon, or pushing against him in the swift current of a river. When he prayed to the goddess statues to strengthen his body, he asked for stamina before he asked for anything else, knowing that in addition to being able to fight for longer stretches of time, he'd also be able to spend more time in the water before having to take a break.

Link loved swimming, but he hadn't always been so comfortable in the water. A few days removed from waking up in the Shrine of Resurrection, still on the Great Plateau, he had witnessed a bokoblin drown after he attracted its attention on the other side of a pond deep enough for the unlucky monster to get in over its head. After expending his small store of energy on trying and failing to scale a short cliff that ringed one side of the pond, Link had slipped and clawed his way to the flat ground at its base. As he sat panting in the shallows, rocks loosened from the cliff side clattering around him and splashing in the water, he saw, to his alarm, a bokoblin snorting in the grass in front of him on the opposite shore. It looked up, startled by the sound of his arrival, and jumped into the air with a squeal. The creature single-mindedly threw itself toward Link and into the water, clutching a crudely shaped wooden club that was of no use to it as a flotation device, and snarled angrily as it sank to the bottom of the pond. The experience was a small, constant reminder in the back of his mind that he could fall victim to the same fate. If he pushed himself too hard, or got a cramp, or underestimated the distance to the other shore, or misjudged the flow of a river that seemed placid on the surface, or over-relied on Mipha's Grace, or one of a hundred other things happened, he'd be dead with unconscious ease, and what would become of Zelda and Hyrule then?

When Zelda's mood permitted it, he liked to travel to one of his favorite swimming spots and lose himself to the water's caress for an hour or so. He avoided swimming in Zora's Domain, even though he knew that was where the very best lakes and rivers were located. There were plenty of other perfectly acceptable waterways elsewhere. Nobody watched him as he swam, nobody important, anyhow. He didn't think the fish and frogs he shared his swimming holes with cared one way or another about the large animal splashing around with them, as long as he didn't get too close. If he paced himself, he entered a semi-meditative state, where his thoughts centered mainly on the smooth workings of his body. His full, even breaths filled his mind as well as his lungs, and his muscles sang with the push and pull of his strokes and kicks. Occasionally, something shiny under the water attracted his attention and diverted him from his path, turning treasure salvaging into a lucrative and unintentional benefit of his pastime.

He had to go easy when he swam, reminding himself often not to push himself to his limits. The elbow of his sword arm had a tendency to hyper-extend when he flexed and swept his arms through the water's increased density. The first time pain flashed through the ligaments of his joint, he recalled with a surge of shock how he had obtained his injury.

One day, at the age of fourteen, he had been climbing the slippery rocks that flanked a waterfall with his Zora friends. He didn't have much time for goofing around— he had been the carrier of the Master Sword for nearly a year, and as a knight of Hyrule, his responsibilities precluded him from having the kind of social life his contemporaries possessed. Link's leisure time was measured in hours, carved from time he was supposed to spend studying and sleeping, which explained the haste with which he had scrambled up to the flat rock at the head of the waterfall. The protrusion in the cliff served as a diving board into the deep pool below him, which had been filled with the adoring faces of the Bazz Brigade.

Several things had combined to result in his unfortunate accident. A recent growth spurt had stretched Link's petite body an awkward three inches, and he had not yet gotten used to where his limbs ended or how much space his newly larger body took up. An unused handhold on the rock face, unknowingly slick with algae, had beckoned for his grasp. A drop of five feet, that if he had been positioned a bit more to the left, he would have cleared the rocks at the edge of the pool and landed in the water. He had slipped and fell, and had mistakenly braced his arms behind him to break the impact. The sickening, wet snap of bones breaking and cartilage rupturing was swallowed by the roar of the waterfall, as was Link's abject cry of pain.

Thank Jabu-Jabu, thank Hylia, thank Dorephan first and foremost for letting his daughter have the freedom to follow her friends for an afternoon's reprieve from her royal duties. Mipha's healing skills were called upon to fix the backwards bend in Link's elbow, and with tears in his eyes, he thanked her for her generosity. Although Link was her principal point of reference with respect to Hylian biology, Mipha hadn't had a lot of practice healing broken bones with associated soft tissue trauma, and the joint never quite felt the same as it did before its injury. At least, that was what Mipha claimed as her excuse. A few years later, she had confessed that her distress over his injury had threatened to overwhelm the love she felt for him, and her inner turmoil had interfered with her healing abilities.

Link couldn't even promise her that he'd stick to swimming for the rest of the day. Half an hour later he scrambled up to the ledge for one last graceful swan dive into the pool before leaving for guard duty. Only the slightest tinge of shame tempered his feelings of success as he left his friends, except for one frowning girl, hollering and clapping in appreciation behind him.

He opened his eyes and turned his head to where he thought Zelda was sitting, meeting her solemn gaze with a placating smile. Feeling encouraged by her lack of yelling, he stretched out in the water and closed his eyes once more. Link reconsidered his unwillingness to think about the Zora princess. The prospect of remembering times gone by with Mipha was preferable to recalling his first days out of his coma, which was all that he seemed to be able to remember as he floated in the warm, still water. If he tried to guide his thoughts, deliberately recollecting a positive experience from his former life might be best he could do under the unexpectedly stressful circumstances.

Sometimes when he swam, songs that matched the tempo of his strokes whispered along in his mind. They sang to him in women's voices, ones he recognized as his mother's and Mipha's. This was another truth he elided when he spoke to Zelda. He remembered his family after reading the letters reproduced in the _Rumor Mill _, or at least enough about them to feel echoes of the emotions that had prompted him to write in the first place. His mother was a baker, the best in the village, as he had bragged to Mipha at the age of eight. He wrote of the resonant sweetness of her voice and the verses she sang to him when he was younger and unwilling to go to sleep. He had surprised Zelda a time or two by bursting into song from a dead silence, but she had been mollified when he explained how he had come by the scraps of unearthed rhymes. He neglected to inform her that Mipha had sung to him too, of legends passed down by innumerable generations of Zora. Many of their songs spoke of water and life intertwined, and he tried to recall a line or two from one of them, to see if it could spark another remembrance.

_Warm water, living water. Soft breeze, a cool hand clasped his his own… _There it was! A teasing vision of a memory yet to be recovered. Link relaxed into the water, concentrating on his senses and on the phantom feeling of a hand entwining its fingers through his.

He and Mipha often ended a sparring session with a soak to cool down and relax their aching muscles in a pond or lake nearest to their training ground of the day. The one they had found this time was warmed by the sun's rays in its shallows, and because it was fed by a small, trickling stream instead of a turbulent waterfall, the large pond was calm and inviting to the two young lovers taking a dip.

They floated side by side, watching dragonflies zoom in and out of view, while high up in the sky tiny clouds passed overhead. The sound of Mipha's voice carried strangely through the water. Link tilted his head, lifting one ear in the air in an attempt to make her words stand out from the background noise of the pond. He smiled at his success, letting water fill his mouth through his closed teeth. Her quiet voice was lovely, and when she sang, it was tremulous and ethereal, filling him with a sense of peace and belonging. Mipha finished her song, the melody subsiding into the murmur of their surroundings, and sat up in the water to face him.

"I know we haven't been resting very long, but I feel so refreshed already. It must be this warm water." She moved her arm thoughtfully back and forth in front of her, then shifted her gaze away from him, focusing on the rucksack of various sundries they had brought with them. "I'm ready for another round," she concluded.

"Another round of what?"

"I need to practice my mouthwork," she said evasively, and swam to the edge of the pond. _Mouthwork? Certainly she meant to say footwork? _Link shook his head, wondering if water had clogged his ear canals. There was grace in all the Zora princess's movements, and as she left the pond to rummage through the bag and retrieve a small item that she concealed in her hand, Link watched her with an intensity that bordered on reverence. He was still puzzling over her use of the word _mouthwork _when she returned to his side, and showed him two thick pieces of leather, curling like smiles in the palm of her hand.

"I will be able to take you safely into my mouth if I wear these over my teeth," she explained. "Do you think you can float here, or do you want to sit on a rock out of the pond?"

"Let's try it in here," he quickly decided, pulling her towards the deep water in the center of the pond, and Mipha flashed him a rare toothy smile.

"Try to stay still, I don't particularly feel like getting kicked in the gills again," she reminded him, her smile lingering on her lips. "And remember to keep your head above the surface. I do not want to have to resuscitate you because you succumbed to an excess of recklessness!" She fitted the mouthguards into place, her innocent gaze darkening with mischief, and slid down into the water.

Outside of the memory, in the hot spring, Link allowed all of his body except for his head to sink beneath the surface of the water. He was going to mimic his positioning in the past, within reason, in hopes that it kept the recollection going. He was proud of himself for intentionally bringing up the memory instead of having it happen to him. He was tired of feeling like a bystander in his own life.

He and Mipha always fooled around outside, out of necessity as well as preference. Privacy was almost an unknown concept among the Zora, and Mipha had struggled to balance Link's need for discretion with her frustration that he couldn't simply sink to the bottom of the river with her for an hour or more. In the large, airy building that made up the royal complex of Zora's Domain, there wasn't a firm delineation between _inside _and _outside. _Walls and common rooms were reduced to their minimal forms in order to provide maximum airflow and to give open views of the landscape whenever possible. Most of the Domain's residents slept in communal pools, and in them, activities were regularly carried out that would make a Hylian blush to hear of. In fact, when seven-year-old Link told his mother that he saw some Zoras "making tadpoles" after a visit in the winter, he had a slew of confusing new restrictions enforced on him for future trips to the Domain.

Through the rippled surface of the water, Link watched with rising anticipation as Mipha slowly sank into the cool depths of the pond. She kept her hands on his body as she descended, and the smooth skin of her palms made a delightful contrast to her hard fingernails, which traced firm lines of heat down his abdomen. Single-minded in her pursuit, she did not stop long to tease him, and after nosing him with the crest of her forehead a few times to determine his level of readiness, she tugged him free from his undershorts.

Link attempted to watch as Mipha applied her long, hot tongue to the tip of his penis and worked her way down his shaft, but nearly aspirating a noseful of water put an end to that plan. He tipped his head back and contented himself with concentrating on staying still while floating, which took more effort than he first imagined it would. The usual sounds of their intimate act that he expected to hear were absent, covered up and washed away by the surrounding water. He made up for its insulating properties by being a bit louder with his vocalizations, knowing the water would transmit his cries and moans of pleasure down to where Mipha could hear them. Here in the outskirts of Zora's Domain, he could be as loud as he wanted to. He was fairly sure they shared the mountainside with nothing larger than a trout, and if Mipha kept up her practice, his shouts would scare even the bugs and birds away.

The water's temperature was pleasant, but it was nothing compared to the warmth of the tongue and mouth lavishing attention between his legs. He could no longer concentrate on floating unaided, so he raised his legs to try to rest them on Mipha's buoyant shoulders and leaned back into the water. Changing positions allowed him to relax further, and he dipped lower into the water, using all his concentration to marvel at Mipha's oral talents. What she was able to do with just her tongue regularly left him amazed and crying out his satisfaction to the heavens, and he waited in a buzz of expectant nerves for her mouth to come into play. The guards covering her sharp teeth performed their job well, and he felt nothing but soft and smooth textures when she slid his cock past her lips and began gently sucking with an experimental air. The excited breath he exhaled when he felt that warm, enveloping pressure was so large and so sudden, he sank entirely beneath the surface, slipping away from her touch like a dropped stone.

Suspended in the water, Link felt his heartbeat pounding in his chest, ears, and groin, and wondered what was so bad about being completely submerged. It might be worth the trouble to come like this, floating in pure pleasure and not having to worry about staying at the surface. All he had to do was lift his head every so often to take a breath, and that was hardly an inconvenience. He wasn't so far down that it was dangerous, was he?

Link opened his eyes, his bliss waning as his confusion grew in its place at what he beheld. He wasn't floating anymore, and he no longer felt Mipha's enthusiastic caresses. He was resting on the rocky bottom of the pond, dim light and waterweed obscuring his vision as he searched for his absent lover.

_Mipha! Where did she go? _

He spun around slowly with his arms outstretched, and squinted through the darkened, hazy water, looking for the familiar red shade of the Zora's skin.

_She was right next to me! How could she have disappeared? _

Link's lungs ached and dark spots danced around the edges of his vision. He needed to breathe— he hadn't prepared for holding his breath this long. He tried to push off from the rocks, but his heavy limbs resisted his order. Panic rose in his burning chest. Why couldn't he move? How did he get so deep? Where was Mipha?

"Link!" A wavering, indistinct voice called to him through the water, and he turned his head toward the sound.

"Link, get up!" The voice chimed like a bell, giving his increasingly clouded mind a direction to follow. He flailed at the bottom of the pond, gathered the last of his stamina, and pushed upward with all his might.

"Link, I didn't mean it when I said you should keep yourself _entirely _submerged! I should have specified the protocol you were to follow! Link, can you hear me? You were underwater so long, I knew something had gone wrong!" He let the voice flow over him without comprehending the words as he broke through the surface of the water. Chest heaving as he coughed, water and drool coming out of his mouth and nose, he felt hands grip his arms and guide him through the shallows.

_Mipha, I'm sorry. I should have listened to you. _

More air entered his lungs in revitalizing waves and his awareness expanded bit by bit. He was sitting on a rock in the hot spring. Pushing aside the wet strands of hair that covered his eyes, he saw not Mipha, but Zelda, thigh-deep in the water in front of him with a very concerned look on her face. She had been repeating something in words that were gently apologetic and insistent, but the buzzing in his ears drowned everything out and he couldn't understand her. Her eyes dipped down from his face for an instant, then returned again for a longer look, and he followed her gaze to his lap, where his erection was visible through the sodden, skintight fabric of his undershorts.

"_What _did you remember?"


	7. Chapter 7

She should have thrown Link back into the hot spring like an undersized Sizzlefin Trout as soon as she looked down at his lap and saw what had sprung up between his legs. When Zelda realized that he had been playing with himself under the water instead of finally taking the experiment seriously, her level of concern for his well-being suddenly plummeted and the notion struck her to toss him back in. But when she looked up at Link's face and saw the confusion, fear, and loss laid out in plain and overwhelming opposition to the excitement showing through his undershorts, her impulse to shove him into the water evaporated and instead she began to think about what could have caused such an unusual and alarming reaction in her knight.

Link was no actor. He couldn't feign the emotions she read in his face as he leaned against her supportive hands and caught his breath, and neither was he completely successful at keeping those emotions locked up within himself. His response indicated trauma, not guilt at being caught… but his erection… Was it possible he was unaware of his body's reaction to his recalled memory? This was all so curious, and more than a little confounding, but before she could demand answers, she had to make sure he was in the right environment to give them.

Zelda rose from her protective crouch over Link and waded through the shallows to retrieve her journal from the rock she had left it on when she realized the subject of her experiment wasn't coming back up to breathe. She made her way to their bags, took out a towel and a tinderbox, and hurried back to Link's perch.

"I'm going to make a fire," she said as she draped the towel over Link's shoulders, which trembled in time to his exhalations. "You can dry off, we'll have lunch, and then you can tell me what happened in there."

Link twisted his fingers into the towel, holding it taut around his body. "Thank you." His voice came out in a gravelly monotone, and Zelda cupped his cheek in her hand, raising his eyes to meet hers.

"You're safe now." She strengthened her voice, infusing it with confidence and affection. "Everything will be ready in no time at all, even though I have to light the fire with flint instead of a flameblade." She smiled and rubbed her thumb across his cheekbone, wiping away a few drops of water, and followed it with the lightest of kisses.

* * *

They sat silently, knee to unclothed knee, and watched the fire consume a twisted, lichen-covered branch while they finished the last of the mushroom rice balls Link had packed for their lunch. Zelda licked her fingers, thinking while she did so that table manners didn't apply when eating away from a table, then looked down at the journal left open by her side. It was time to tackle the next step in the plan, but not with the two of them on opposite sides of her pencil. He needed her strength, like he had done for her so many times before. She left her journal on the ground and put her hand on his back instead. Tilting her head to rest it on his shoulder, she said softly, "I hate to ask, but what happened to you was so unusual, I think it's important we start talking about it." She continued, keeping her tone light to counteract her prodding words. "Scientific progress depends on your response! What, pray tell, did you remember?"

Link shuddered and remained silent. From her place beside him, his drying fringe of hair blocked his face from view, but he kept his gaze turned away, seemingly fixated on the crackling fire in front of him.

"I cannot change the scope of the experiment if you are not forthcoming in your recollection. You almost drowned, Link. I think that warrants some conversation on the topic. If we attempt this method of memory retrieval again, I don't want to be sending you to your death!" Her impatience, along with her concern for his mental stability, rose like the flames she saw leaping from twig to twig in the fire before them, and she tried to hide her conflicting emotions behind her extensive vocabulary. "If you need more time to organize your thoughts, that is acceptable, but I would like a preliminary report while your memory is fresh. Even a single word is sufficient to begin the record."

The breeze picked up again, rustling the leaves in the nearby tree. Zelda watched Link watch several dislodged leaves fall through the air, and she held back a sigh. Link shook his head, an indeterminate gesture that brought her no closer to understanding what was going on in his mind. Was he shrugging off her request, or was he following her advice and preparing to gather his thoughts? She waited, wondering, then decided to give him some space for a moment and got up to rearrange her wet clothes by the fireside.

What could she do if he refused to speak? Her mind churned with indecision, and she recalled all those years he had spent in stoic silence as Hyrule's chosen hero and preeminent royal knight. _Please let your guard down, Link,_ she thought. _I don't want to chip away at your defenses like this. _She added more wood to the fire and sat back down, exuding a calm air of friendly patience. She had her answer when he cleared his throat, opened his mouth, and told her he didn't know what to say.

"That's fine." She could work with that. She could guide him through his hesitation. "Tell me what you can, and I'll write it down, and then later, perhaps once we return home, we can go over it and add onto it. Start from the beginning. We can take all the time you need," she said with more patience than she felt. If the memory was so disturbing, then why couldn't he say so?

"I don't think more time is going to help me any."

Zelda's frustration flared, a spark catching the fuel of her doubt that Link's attitude was going to change. She couldn't let him know she was disappointed by his regression into old coping mechanisms, but she could tell him she was worried, which she was. She remembered a helpful passage from a medical textbook she had once read, and said, "In certain times of trauma, an unusual physiological response—"

"It wasn't a bad memory," he interrupted, the volume of his confession barely discernible above the background noise of the bubbling spring and the pop and hiss of the fire.

"Okay." She graciously accepted his spoken gift. She pressed on, hoping to peel back his layers of reticence and get to the substance of his recollection like a steamed armoranth bud, "That's encouraging. So..." She curled into his side, hoping she was providing comfort rather than being too nosy. "What made it good?"

Link stiffened, and she knew she had to tread carefully. She felt like they were on the verge of a breakthrough, and with his continued cooperation, they would have something to show for his near-drowning experience. What if she turned her questioning into a game of some sort? He already knew how seriously she felt about returning his lost memories, and injecting some levity might take enough pressure off to let him open up. "What about this," she said lightly. "I'll try to guess with a yes or no question, and you tell me if I'm right or wrong!"

"No."

"I'm supposed to ask you a question first, silly!"

"Can you stop treating me like I'm a puzzle you need to solve?" His exasperated response shocked her enough to make her draw back in alarm, and she could tell by his faint scowl that she had been too pushy after all.

"I'm simply saying—"

"I know what you're trying to do," he said, finally turning to face her. Steel flashed in his eyes, warning her not to continue. It was as good as a door shut in her face, and she narrowed her eyes in return, readying herself to barge through his defenses.

"As your princess, I can—" She snapped her mouth shut before the final words _order you to tell me_ escaped, and all the fight drained from her with a sigh. If she was reduced to falling back on her royal title in order to force the person she cared about most in the world to divulge what she had come to realize was very obviously a highly personal and complicated memory, she might as well give up on their whole relationship.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it to come out that way." She had succeeded in doing the very thing she had been trying to avoid. Typical, the way fortune reversed itself for her. She pushed the remains of her frustration aside and felt uselessness grow in its stead. "I just don't understand why you won't talk to me."

Link's gaze softened as he looked at Zelda, but he didn't offer any further explanation.

"I see now that it was foolish of me to expect total restoration of your memory on the first try." Link may have considered the matter to be closed, but Zelda wasn't ready to quit until she heard it from his lips. This first venture might have gone all wrong, but they could handle a small setback. Link was a Champion, and he had recovered from much worse. "When you feel up to it, we can warp over to the Chamber—"

In a voice tinged with equal parts sorrow and defeat, Link quietly said, "I can't do this anymore."

Interpreting his _this_ as the experiment they were muddling through and not referring to something more abstract like their relationship, or his continued existence, or —least plausible of all— not talking about his problems, she asked, "What do you mean? It's working!"

He shook his head, a quick, decisive jerk that perfectly encapsulated his demeanor. "Not in the right way," he answered.

She felt her hope start to crumble around her. Arguing was futile, and she didn't want to elevate their disagreement into a fight. He was just as stubborn as she was, maybe even more so in certain respects. To name one example among many, she hadn't ever been able to convince him to stop following her around, and although it used to irritate her to no end, she had grown to look forward to and appreciate his act of devotion. The situation they had descended into now, however, was neither endearing nor was she inclined to look forward to it continuing, and so Zelda sat, clutching her knees to her chest, full of loving concern yet uncertain of how she could show it, and above all else, unsure of her next move.

Link shifted, clearing his throat, and threw his arm over Zelda's shoulder. Her heart lifted at his anchoring touch.

"When I woke up," he began, "I didn't remember anything. I only knew my name was Link because that's what you called me… and I didn't know it was you, either." They had had this conversation before. It was always a preamble to divulging something intimate, and Zelda waited patiently for Link's next words. She didn't try to make eye contact with him. It was enough to glance from time to time at the side of his face as he kept his focus on the fire. To hear his low voice and feel the vibration of his words as they transferred from his chest to hers filled her with peace.

"After I left the Plateau, I went to Zora's Domain." That short sentence referred to weeks of exploration, she knew. The beginning of his journey was fraught with danger, and she had tried her best to use her telepathic powers to check in on him as often as she could as he made his way blindly across the country. How lonely he had felt, and how powerless she had been, to watch and wait for his return. "Prince Sidon met me on the road to the Domain, and the only thing he knew about me was that I was a Hylian. It had been too long since he had last seen me —he didn't recognize me. So he couldn't tell me— I wasn't prepared for the welcome I got when I reached the palace." _Welcome_— another euphemism that concealed the truth of his encounter with the Zoras. His ears drooped slightly, and she imagined he was remembering the frosty reception he had received from the elders of the Domain, most of whom blamed the resurrected knight for their beloved princess's untimely demise, and held no qualms about telling him so right to his face.

"I knew who Mipha was, a little… I saw her in my memory of coming down from Mount Lanyaru." He stopped to rub his face with his free hand. The hiss of the fire filled the silence he left. "She was a Champion, a gifted healer and warrior, a princess, and my fiancée… and I had no idea. If I had known then what I know now, maybe things would have started off differently, but I walked into a century of unresolved grief, and I stirred it all up again." He tilted his head back to look at the thick branches spread above them, as if a distraction was waiting there, hidden behind the leaves, and said reluctantly, "I keep remembering her, and how I loved her."

A heartbeat passed. Two. A dozen, counted off and recognized by the analytical part of Zelda's brain that always noticed those mundane details, the kind of minute ephemera that kept ticking along no matter the surrounding chaos. She tried to breathe in time to Link's even, clear-lunged exhalations as she thought about what he had just said. In his roundabout way, he had given her the information she needed to piece together the substance of his recollection. He had remembered Mipha _again,_ which meant that he had remembered her _before,_ but that could mean almost anything. They had spent so much time reading journals and talking about Zelda's memories that he was bound to have remembered something, though what he specifically recalled he never did say. And then, of course, there was _The Rumor Mill_, the unlikely source of a great deal of his past. Had he been trying to think about her, there, in the spring? Or did it just happen, somehow, tied to his experience in the Chamber of Resurrection? She supposed it was not out of the realm of possibility for the spring to trigger any number of water-related memories, especially if one was about to be confronted by their past trauma. She discarded the questions that crowded in her mind. They could wait. He could not.

"Of course you loved her," she elected to say. Despite her pledge to remain impartial in the face of this revelation, she found herself struggling to remain focused on Link's distress. She knew, in more detail than she would have liked, that Zoras did in water what humans did in bed. Or on land, at least, and her imagination began to supply her with a series of salacious activities the two Champions might have engaged in. "You two were very close for so long, I'm surprised I never suspected what was really going on." She pressed her fingernails into the palm of her hand as she tightened it into a fist, and forced herself to continue speaking. "Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something. Mipha was very important to you, and you should have that part of your life back. We can try again, and this time, I'll make sure you float." Zelda congratulated herself on managing to adopt a breezy attitude toward what could very easily devolve into shouted accusations and tearful breakdowns, until she saw the stricken look cross Link's face as he turned toward her.

"I don't want what we have to change."

"Why would it?" Panic lapped around the edges of her mind. Maybe trying to smooth it all over was the wrong path to take.

Link's brow furrowed. "You know what I was like back then, and I'm different now. What if, the more I remember, the more I become… him."

"Link, who you were and who you are is one and the same. I just want you to understand your past, because it's my fault you're separated from it!" Zelda took a deep breath. She could have sworn she'd told him all this before, but perhaps she'd only rehearsed it mentally, preparing for their eventual conversation. "I wanted this experiment to work for _you_, so you could have the perspective of your past to inform your present. If I failed to get my point across, well, that's my responsibility, just like my other failures. We _will_ find a different way to restore your memory, I promise!"

Link stood, gripping the towel in white-knuckled hands, and began to pace in front of the fire. "Stop it. Stop saying I'm going to get my memory back. I don't want it— I don't need to know what happened before— before I died!" His eyes flashed with unnamable emotions, or unshed tears, he was moving too swiftly for Zelda to tell, and his voice was rough again as he said, "I know I'm not fine. I don't think I'll ever be fine, but I accept it. The bits and pieces I've recovered, it's all shown me that I'm another man now." He stopped and faced Zelda. "And you, you've changed too. Why would you want to rehash our failures, when we can enjoy—" his voice cracked, "—our lives?"

Zelda rose to her feet, summoning every ounce of fortitude she possessed and channeling it into her stately presence. She thought she was shocked before, but this turn of events threatened to upend her completely. Did she miss some subtle sign of his attitude change after priding herself on her attentiveness? Why would the Hero of Hyrule not want to remember his past? When that process was what had been fueling his progress as he worked toward defeating Ganon? Her facade of strength must have been effective, for Link stepped closer to her before she could reply and enveloped her in a hug.

"I don't have to remember every little bit of my past to know what happened," he whispered into her hair. "The past is all around us, crumbling at our feet. It hurts to remember, and I'm tired of hurting. The pain isn't teaching me anything."

Zelda softened in his tightening embrace. What could she say to counter that? That he'd given up too soon? That it didn't sound like him? What did these days? Anything she _did_ say would sound like an argument, she realized. She was unsettled and he was probably mentally exhausted. Making a decisive statement so soon after this emotional upheaval of theirs would be like tossing bomb arrows into a fire. But if that was how Link really felt, even if he had only recently changed his mind, she could accept it, given enough time. She'd _have_ to accept it—her instruction thus far had nearly drowned him in a preventable accident. As for now, a walk would take the edge off. A walk away from this accursed spring and all it reminded her hero of. And if stopping the experiments meant Link would not gain any more memories of personal time spent with Mipha, maybe that was the silver lining to the storm cloud of Zelda's dashed dream of recovering his former life.

For all that the princess and the hero were the same height, it was sometimes frustratingly difficult for them to see eye-to-eye. As Zelda backed away from Link to more easily cradle his head in her hands, she noted with relief that his eyes were free from both tears and steel, and she kissed him softly, her heart aching with her own unnamable emotions. "I would never force you to do something you do not want to do. Please believe me." He nodded into her cupped hands. "Do you want to go home?"

"Anywhere we are is home to me." He smiled, pure and true, and it wiped away some of the sadness Zelda felt about the last few disastrous hours.

"Let's gather our things then," she said, smiling in return, "and find a new home for the night. Somewhere we haven't been before, a place not too close to any large bodies of water, perhaps?"

Link didn't laugh at her attempt at humor, but he did kiss her with a firmness that lightened her heart even more, and that was a far better reaction than what she had been aiming for.


End file.
